An Experimental Study on Ice Accretion and Anti-/De-Icing of a Pitot Tube

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1913.vid A series of experimental investigations were conducted to examine the dynamic ice accretion process pertinent to the pitot tube icing and anti-/de-icing efficiency for different strategies. By leveraging the unique Icing Research Tunnel at Iowa State University (i.e., ISU-IRT), the anti-/de-icing characteristics on the conventional electric heating system as well as a hybrid system, which combines the electric heating and the superhydro-/ice-phobic surface coating, were studied in terms of effectiveness and required power consumption under the typical glaze ice condition. During the experiments, while a high-speed imaging system was used to record the dynamic ice accretion and anti-/de-icing processes over the surface of the pitot probe model under various test conditions, a high-speed Infrared (IR) thermal imaging system was also applied to map the corresponding surface temperature distributions over the pitot probe surface to characterize the unsteady heat transfer process associated with the ice accretion and anti-/de-icing process. The results demonstrate that the ice accretion over the pitot tube model is mainly limited to the leading-edge of the total pressure tube and the pitot tube holder. For the electric heating strategy, the anti-/de-icing efficiency for the total pressure tube is higher than that of the pitot tube holders due to the arrangement of the resistive heater. Compared with the conventional strategy to brutally heating the pitot tube surface to keep the tube totally ice-free, the hybrid strategy was found to be able to effectively achieve the same anti-/de-icing performance with even less power consumption (i.e., up to ~ 50% power saving in the required power consumption during anti-icing operation and ~ 30% energy saving during the de-icing operation), which makes it a very promising strategy for pitot tube icing mitigation.