Deicing of Solids Using Radiant Heating

This paper considers removing ice adhering to a solid substrate by irradiating the free surface of the ice layer. An acrylic and a metal are used as solids, and an array of quartz halogen dichroic lamps having a large fraction of their spectral energy in the visible and near-infrared spectrum are employed as the radiation source. The effects of ice layer thickness, radiation properties of the substrate surface, and the magnitude of the incident radiation flux are studied. A transient one-dimensional heat-conduction/radiation analysis is used to compare the model predictions with measurements. The results show that, for otherwise identical conditions, ice is more readily removed from an opaque metal than from a semitransparent acrylic substrate.