Mechanism and experiment on de-icing by plasma synthetic jet actuator with oblique jet outlet

Icing is widespread during aircraft flight and severely impairs aircraft performance. Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with weak anti-icing capabilities cannot allocate their limited energy to anti-icing and de-icing, making it difficult to equip them with traditional anti-icing and de-icing methods. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop new low-energy-consumption and high-efficiency anti-icing and de-icing technologies. An oblique jet Plasma Synthetic Jet Actuator (PSJA) was designed, and experimental research on its ice-breaking flow field and characteristics of non-adherent-ice-breaking was conducted. The results show that compared with the straight jet, the oblique jet achieves more efficient energy utilization and a larger effec-tive de-icing area. From the perspective of low energy consumption, experiments on removing adherent ice using a com-bined electric heating/oblique jet plasma synthetic jet actuator system were carried out. For 4 mm-thick adherent ice, the experiments demonstrated that the oblique jet plasma synthetic jet actuator can achieve residue-free removal of adherent ice after the electric heating device operates for 40 s, while the straight jet plasma synthetic jet actuator requires 80 s to achieve the same level of ice destruction. This verifies the low-energy-consumption advantage of the oblique jet plasma synthetic jet actuator compared to traditional electric heating and straight jet plasma synthetic jet actuator de-icing methods. By analyzing the evolution of the liquid film boundary between the ice and the substrate during the ice-breaking process of the plasma actuator, the mechanism of efficient adherent ice removal by the oblique jet plasma synthetic jet actuator was further revealed: the oblique jet creates a larger non-adhesive area, reducing the difficulty of breaking adherent ice and achieving effective de-icing. The above research can provide theoretical and practical references for low-energy-consumption ice removal of UAVs.