A Parametric Study on the Thermodynamic Characteristics of DBD Plasma Actuation and Its Potential for Wind Turbine Icing Mitigation

Wind turbine icing represents the most significant threat to the integrity of wind turbines in cold weather. Ice formation on wind turbine blades was found to cause significant aerodynamic performance degradation, resulting in a substantial drop in energy production. Recently developed Dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma-based anti-/de-icing systems showed very promising effects for aircraft icing mitigation. In this present study, DBD plasma-based anti-/de-icing systems were employed for wind turbine icing mitigation. First, a comprehensive parametric study is conducted to investigate the effects of various DBD plasma actuation parameters on its thermodynamic characteristics. An infrared (IR) thermal imaging system is used to quantitatively measure the temperature distributions over the test plate under various test conditions. DBD plasma actuators are embedded over the surface of a DU91-W2-250 wind turbine blade model, and a series of experiments were conducted by using the Icing Research Tunnel available at Iowa State University (i.e., ISU-IRT) to evaluate the anti-/de-icing performance of the system for wind turbine icing mitigation. Dynamic anti-icing process was recorded by a high-speed imaging system, and an IR thermal camera was used to map the temperature distributions over the surface of the wind turbine blade model during the anti-/de-icing processes.