A comprehensive study was performed to explore the thermal characteristics of NS-dielectric-barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuation over an airfoil/wing surface and evaluate the anti-/de-icing performance of NS-DBD plasma actuators for aircraft in-flight icing mitigation. While the fundamentals of thermal energy generation and heat transfer in NS-DBD plasma actuation over the airfoil/wing model were described in great details, a series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of different environmental parameters on the heating efficiency of NS-DBD plasma actuators over the airfoil/wing surface. With the temporally-synchronized-and-spatiallyresolved high-speed visualization and infrared imaging system, not only the transient thermal characteristics of NS-DBD plasma actuation over the airfoil/wing surface were revealed, but also the anti-icing performances of the NS-DBD plasma actuators were evaluated under different icing conditions, i.e. rime, mixed, and glaze. The impacts of incoming airflow velocity, air temperature, and angle of attack of the airfoil/wing model on the thermal characteristics of NS-DBD plasma actuation over the airfoil/wing surface were systematically investigated based on the measurement results. It was found that the thermal characteristics of NS-DBD plasma actuation over the airfoil/ wing surface are closely coupled with the boundary layer airflow and the unsteady heat transfer process over the airfoil/wing model exposed in the frozen-cold airflows. The anti-icing performances of the NS-DBD plasma actuators under the different icing conditions were found to be varying significantly due to the variations of surface heating efficiency of the NS-DBD plasma actuators. The anti-/de-icing performance of the NS-DBD plasma actuators was found to be improved dramatically by increasing the operating frequency of the plasma actuators. The findings derived from the present study are very helpful to explore/optimize design paradigms for the development of novel plasma-based anti-/de-icing strategies tailored specifically for aircraft inflight icing mitigation to ensure safer and more efficient aircraft operation in atmospheric icing conditions.

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Ice accretion on airframe surfaces occurs as aircraft come across supercooled water droplets in the cloud, which was found to greatly influence the flight performance and safety. In the present study, the thermal effect induced by DBD plasma actuation was experimentally investigated in order to explore its potential as an alternative strategy to current anti-/de-icing methods for aircraft icing mitigation. A series of experiments were conducted in the Iowa State University Icing Research Tunnel (ISU-IRT) with a NACA0012 airfoil/wing model embedded with DBD plasma actuators. During the experiments, in addition to recording the dynamic ice accretion process by using a high-speed imaging system, the quantitative surface temperature measurements were also obtained using an Infra-Red (IR) thermal imaging system. The thermal effects induced by conventional AC-DBD and nanosecond pulsed DBD (i.e., ns-DBD) plasma actuators were compared under the same power input and icing test conditions. The dynamic icing process was also investigated with the ns-DBD plasma actuation under different pulse repetition frequencies. It was found that the anti-/de-icing performance of ns-DBD plasma actuation would improve with increasing pulse repetition frequency.