Search

Ice adhesion is an issue spanning a wide range of technical fields. In the aerospace industry, ice accretion has led to a large number of casualties and costs the industry billions of dollars every year. To design effective anti-/de-icing systems, the adhesion of ice to surfaces must be understood. In this review paper, the authors surveyed for papers providing methods for the measurement of ice adhesion. 113 papers were identified for comparison, with data being extracted from 58 papers with common test surfaces (aluminum, steel, Teflon® (Chemours), and polyurethane). The methods used were categorized and data were compared based on their precision and the trends they demonstrated. Conceptual problems were identified with the tests used in the literature and discussed, and open questions relevant to testing the adhesion of ice were identified. Several key parameters affecting ice adhesion identified from the literature were temperature, surface roughness, strain rate, and impact velocity. Their effects on adhesion strength were discussed. While researching this topic, it was discovered that many papers did not report the strain rate in their tests, and the vast majority of papers did not correct their data for stress concentrations on the surface, either of which has been shown to cause variation in the data by one order of magnitude. Data compared from the literature typically spanned one to three orders of magnitude. The causes of these variations were discussed.

A new design for a droplet generator capable of producing single droplets is presented. The design relies on thermoelectric heating to vaporize water at the interface between a droplet and a blunt syringe tip. While other designs require careful tuning to produce drops of varying size, this technique enables the simple creation of droplets of any size within a range. The design is of simple construction and can be completed with off-the-shelf components, and relies on resistive heating to vaporize water at or near the droplet-nozzle interface and release the droplets. We demonstrated that the design can be used to produce droplets as small as 110 μm or as large as 2 mm. Drop size is limited by the geometry of the nozzle since water must wet the tip of the nozzle and hang under gravity. Our experiments showed that released droplets have relatively small disturbances introduced by the release mechanism when compared to competing techniques. These disturbances were intermittently observed as the voltage, pulse width, and drop size were changed, and optimal settings were determined for the smallest drop sizes produced.

The formation of ice on aircraft is a highly dynamic process during which ice will expand and contract upon freezing and undergoing changes in temperature. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations were performed investigating the stress build up in a simplified case with uniform temperature changes between an idealized ice sample and acrylic substrate. These results were used to place strain gages on custom-built acrylic and aluminum specimens; these specimens were then placed in icing conditions such that ice was grown on top of the specimen. Tee rosettes were placed in two configurations adjacent to thermocouple sensors. It was hypothesized that the ice would expand on freezing and contract as the temperature of the interface returned to the equilibrium conditions. While results from the aluminum specimens matched this hypothesis, results from the acrylic specimens show a short period of contraction followed by a much larger expansion at the interface, indicating more complex ice growth thermodynamics than anticipated. Samples were observed to delaminate, and the data suggests that the residual strain is significant to the shedding of ice for in-flight applications.

Rapid electrokinetic patterning (REP) is a technique for creating self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of spherical particles in a liquid medium, and dynamically controlling them though the simultaneous application of an electric field and optically induced temperature gradients. Previous work has investigated and characterized REP axisymmetric aggregations generated from a focus laser within a uniform electric field; work herein characterizes line-shaped particle assemblies derived from the application of a linearly scanned laser. The resulting aggregations of spherical polystyrene particles (1 μm) suspended in low-conductivity aqueous potassium chloride solution (KCl, 2.5 mS/m) resembled elliptical-shaped crystalline geometries. The mean particle-to-particle spacing within the aggregation remained greater than 1.5 diameters for experiments herein (6.5 Vrms , 30 kHz) due to dipole-dipole repulsive forces. Interparticle spacing demonstrated a linear relationship (1.6-2.1 μm) with increasing scanning lengths (up to 83 μm), decreased from 1.9 to 1.7 μm with increasing scanning frequency (0.38-16 Hz) for a 53 μm scan length, and decreased from 2.0 to 1.6 μm with increasing laser power (11.9-18.8 mW) for a 59 μm, 16 Hz laser scan.

When helicopters are to fly in icing conditions, it is necessary to consider the possibility of ice shed from the rotor blades. In 2013, a series of tests were conducted on a heated tail rotor at NASA Glenn's Icing Research Tunnel (IRT). The tests produced several shed events that were captured on camera. Three of these shed events were captured at a sufficiently high frame rate to obtain multiple images of the shed ice in flight that had a sufficiently long section of shed ice for analysis. Analysis of these shed events is presented and compared to an analytical Shedding Trajectory Model (STM). The STM is developed and assumes that the ice breaks off instantly as it reaches the end of the blade, while frictional and viscous forces are used as parameters to fit the STM. The trajectory of each shed is compared to that predicted by the STM, where the STM provides information of the shed group of ice as a whole. The limitations of the model's underlying assumptions are discussed in comparison to experimental shed events.

Optically-based lab-on-a-chip systems have the distinct advantage of being dynamically controlled in real time, providing reconfigurable operations that can be tuned to perform a variety of tasks. This manuscript demonstrates the concentration of liquid-suspended microparticles using a focused near-infrared laser (980 nm) and a parallel-plate electrode system. The parallel-plate electrodes consisted of an indium tin oxide-coated coverslip and a gold-coated glass substrate. When the laser was applied at 36 mW, the indium tin oxide surface is locally heated creating sharp temperature gradients on the order of 0.07(o) C/μm. When an AC field was applied, electrothermal hydrodynamic forces generated microfluidic vortices. At an AC frequency of 40 kHz, the optically controlled electro-hydrodynamics aggregated colloids at the center of fluid motion on the surface of the indium tin oxide coverslip. The nature of colloid aggregation, translation, and patterning was explored when the translational velocity of the laser spot was varied. This manuscript describes the design of the laser scanning system using commercially available components and the fabrication of the parallel-plate chip. The effect that the laser scanning rate has on the heat transfer, fluid velocity, and colloid aggregation is discussed.

We report the results of a study characterizing the behavior of colloid aggregations under manipulation of a technique known as Rapid Electrokinetic Patterning (REP) – this technique is capable of dynamically manipulating the crystallinity of 2D colloid aggregations, potentially enabling dynamically tunable photonic crystals. Herein, aggregations of spherical polystyrene particles 1.0 μm in diameter suspended in a low conductivity aqueous solution were collected at the surface of an indium-tin oxide coated glass slide. The uniform AC field coupled with laser-induced heating produced electrothermal hydrodynamics which is responsible for the self-assembly characteristics of the planar colloidal aggregation. REP was characterized experimentally by analyzing the mutual particle spacing within the aggregation as a function of the AC signal and laser power. Numerical simulations justified the assumption that the primary forces responsible for colloidal patterning herein are Stokes drag forces and dipole–dipole repulsive forces.

Optically-based lab-on-a-chip systems have the distinct advantage of being dynamically controlled in real time, providing reconfigurable operations that can be tuned to perform a variety of tasks. This manuscript demonstrates the concentration of liquid-suspended microparticles using a focused near-infrared laser (980 nm) and a parallel-plate electrode system. The parallel-plate electrodes consisted of an indium tin oxide-coated coverslip and a gold-coated glass substrate. When the laser was applied at 36 mW, the indium tin oxide surface is locally heated creating sharp temperature gradients on the order of 0.07(o) C/μm. When an AC field was applied, electrothermal hydrodynamic forces generated microfluidic vortices. At an AC frequency of 40 kHz, the optically controlled electro-hydrodynamics aggregated colloids at the center of fluid motion on the surface of the indium tin oxide coverslip. The nature of colloid aggregation, translation, and patterning was explored when the translational velocity of the laser spot was varied. This manuscript describes the design of the laser scanning system using commercially available components and the fabrication of the parallel-plate chip. The effect that the laser scanning rate has on the heat transfer, fluid velocity, and colloid aggregation is discussed.