An Experimental Study on a Hot-air-based Anti-/De-Icing System for Aero-Engine Inlet Guide Vanes

Abstract In the present study, a comprehensive experimental study was conducted to quantify the dynamic icing process on aero-engine inlet guide vanes (IGVs) and to characterize a hot-air-based anti-/de-icing system in order to optimize the design paradigms to reduce the requirements of the bleed air for the IGV icing protection, thereby, minimizing the performance penalties to the aero-engines. A hollowed IGV model embedded with U-shaped hot-air flowing conduit was designed/manufactured and mounted inside an Icing Research Tunnel for the experimental campaign. During the experiments, while a high-speed imaging system was used to record the dynamic ice accretion or anti-/de-icing process over the surface of the IGV model for the test cases without and with turning on the hot-air supply system, the corresponding surface temperature distributions on the IGV model were also measured quantitatively by using a row of embedded thermocouples. The unsteady heat transfer process over the surface of the IGV model was analyzed quantitatively, revealing that the convective heat transfer would dissipate over 85% of the thermal energy provided by the hot-air stream for the anti-/de-icing operation. A comprehensive parametric study was also conducted to evaluate the effects of the operation parameters of the hot-air-based system on its performance for IGV icing protection. It was demonstrated clearly that, with proper operation parameter settings (i.e., the temperature of the hot-air stream being greater than 30 °C and its flow rate is higher than 4.0 g/s), the hot-air-based system was able to effectively prevent ice formation/accretion over the entire IGV surface. The quantitative measurement results would not only be very helpful to elucidate the underlying physics of the important microphysical processes pertinent to IGV icing phenomena, but also can be used as database to validate/verify theoretical modeling and numerical simulations for the development of effective and robust anti-/de-icing systems to protect IGVs from harsh icing environment.