Cleaner ice control for wind turbines

Wind turbines are now used to power homes, farms, schools, hospitals, and much more, but their ability to harness energy is greatly reduced during cold weather, when ice accumulates on the turbines’ blades. Wen et al. developed a deicing method that avoids the use of environmentally harmful chemicals, all while minimizing the amount of energy used.

The team’s work builds on previous studies of surface dielectric barrier discharge (SDBD), where an electrical current is run between two electrodes separated by a barrier to control the flow of air (and therefore heat) around an object. Using numerical simulations, the team accurately calculated the heat distribution around wind turbine blades treated with SDBD over a time increment as small as a nanosecond up to a minute.

“Our study found that the presence of airflow significantly suppresses the surface temperature gradient in an SDBD arrangement,” author Yutai Li said. “Higher airflow velocities result in a slower rate of surface temperature increases towards a steady state. We also found that airflow direction has a substantial effect on temperature change, with the most significant temperature increase observed when the airflow was perpendicular to the surface.”

For simulations, the authors developed a two-stage strategy to calculate heat distribution and accumulation on the nanosecond and minute timescales. The team verified their simulations with a custom test system that comprised a high-voltage pulse generator, a discharge array, an infrared thermal camera, a centrifugal fan, and a wind-speed measurement device called an anemometer in an artificial low-temperature climate laboratory.

Future work will include validating their simulations using wind turbines in the field, rather than a test system.

Source: “Experimental and numerical simulation study of the influence of airflow on the thermal effect of surface-DBD,” by Qinghao Wen, Zhihang Zhao, Yutai Li, Yangyang Fu, Guolin Yang, Zhijin Zhang, Qin Hu, Jianlin Hu, Xinxin Wang, and Xingliang Jiang, Physics of Plasmas (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0285424 .