Experimental investigation of deicing characteristics using hot air as heat source

Highlights: • The hot air deicing process and the heat transfer are investigated. • The ice melt rate is quite consistent and varied little with ice thickness. • The heat supplies and energy consumptions of deicing are researched. • The experimental optimum deicing temperature and velocity are performed. • The maximum hot air deicing energy efficiency is evaluated at 12.1%. - Abstract: Currently, icing occurs in many industries, especially in aircraft, train and grid. Ice accumulating on the equipments may result in degraded reliability, even personal injury. Therefore, deicing need to be adopted to ensure the safety operation. Nowadays, the most widely used standard deicing method is chemical deicing due to its high efficiency, although it has negative impact on environment and high cost. In addition, hot air used to deice is another potential way due to its environment friendly and effectively preventing equipment from icing up again. However, high deicing energy loss and low deicing efficiency obstruct the universality of hot air deicing. Therefore, it is necessary to experimentally study the influence factors to popularize hot air deicing. In this paper, an experimental setup was firstly built up, and then the deicing physical processes were described. This was followed by reporting the experimental results. Finally, detailed discussion and evaluation on energy consumption during deicing operation were presented. The experimental and evaluation results indicated that the favorable air temperature and velocity were 40.0–50.0 °C and 8.0–14.0 m/s, respectively, and the deicing energy efficiencies were as low as 12.1% and 8.8% when with and without recovering the waste energy.