Design Research and Experimental Verification of the Electro-Impulse De-Icing System for Wind Turbine Blades in the Xuefeng Mountain Natural Icing Station

Functioned by mechanical vibration, the electro-impulse de-icing (EIDI) system has been widely utilized in various industrial applications. With a focus on the minimum energy consumption, a new design of the EIDI system is proposed in this paper. To study the performance of this new design, a square aluminum plate representing the Turbine blades is tested. This plate is 420 mm in side-length, 1.5 mm in thickness and covered with a 1 mm thick ice layer. Within this paper, a novel method based on optimization theory is proposed to calculate the desired electric circuit parameters for the de-icing system to be able to remove the 1 mm thick ice layer effectively (96.8% removal rate). The actual EIDI system is then built with the desired circuit parameters calculated from the proposed method, and its performance on de-icing has been tested within the Xuefeng Mountain natural icing station. The tested results achieved a removal percentage of only around 84.3%, which is caused by defects from manufacturing. To further investigate this, a 3D impulse coil-aluminum plate model is built in MAXWELL reflecting the manufacturing defects, and the simulated results are consistent with the 84.3% ice removal rate from experiments on Xuefeng Mountain experiment station. This verified the accuracy of this proposed prediction method. This unique prediction method opened a new floor for the research area of electro-impulse de-icing system and its application.