Experimental Investigation of Power Requirements for Wind Turbines Electrothermal Anti-icing Systems

Atmospheric icing effects is a critical issue for wind farms in Nordic regions; it is responsible for production losses, shortens the equipment’s lifetime, and increases safety risks. Electrothermal anti-icing is one of the existing techniques of ice mitigation, and its energy consumption for wind turbines has been numerically investigated over the years but never fully validated experimentally in the literature. In this work, we aimed to determine the energy consumption for anti-icing systems based solely on experimental investigations. Our methodology is to quantify the energy required to protect a custom-built NACA 0012 airfoil from ice buildup in a wind tunnel. The results are extrapolated to a full-scale wind turbine