Ice accretion presents a major threat for performance and safety of aircraft. Electrothermal Ice Protection Systems present a reliable and flexible alternative to protect critical parts against it. Their main drawback is the high power consumption especially when operating in fully evaporative anti-ice mode. In this work, a genetic algorithm was deployed to optimize the power distribution on the fixed heaters of an electrothermal ice protection system for an airfoil operating in fully evaporative anti-ice mode. The GA is crossover based with a large population and no mutation. The reduction of the overall power consumption is sought. The objective function was constrained with the no-formation of ice in any location of the airfoil. The constraint has been included into the objective function by means of a penalty function. The freezing mass rate is numerically computed by means of the in-house developed code PoliMIce. The best solution encountered, could reduce the power consumption by 13.6% with respect to an intuitive design from literature. Moreover, the optimal layout of heat fluxes reduces the convective losses which are inefficiencies of the system.

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This paper presents a framework for the robust optimization of the heat flux distribution for an anti-ice electrothermal ice protection system under uncertain conditions. The considered uncertainty regards a lack of knowledge concerning the characteristics of the cloud, i.e., the liquid water content and the median volume diameter of water droplets, and the accuracy of measuring devices, i.e., the static temperature probe. Uncertain parameters are modeled as random variables, and two sets of bounds are investigated. A forward uncertainty propagation analysis is carried out using a Monte Carlo approach exploiting a surrogate models. The optimization framework relies on a gradient-free algorithm (mesh adaptive direct search), and two different objective functions are considered, namely, the 95 quantile of the freezing mass rate and the statistical frequency of the fully evaporative operating regime. The framework is applied to a reference test case, revealing a potential to improve the heat flux distribution of the baseline design. A new heat flux distribution is proposed, and it presents a more efficient use of the thermal power, increasing flight safety even at nonnominal environmental conditions.