Design of active de-icing surface for refrigeration equipment of agricultural by-products

Abstract: The accreted ice on the exposed surface is well known to result in severe accidents to power transmission lines, aircraft, boats, and so on, and cause the significant economic losses. The refrigeration equipment of the agricultural by-products is no exception. With the rapid development of the refrigeration industry and the improvement of the food requirement, the number of the China's refrigeration equipment to store the agricultural by-products increases gradually every year. The problem of the influence of the ice accumulation on the refrigeration equipment has become outstanding gradually. In order to reduce the harm and the economic losses of storage of agricultural by-products caused by the icing adhesion phenomenon, an active de-icing model was designed according to the volume expansion during the freezing process. The de-icing model adopted the swelling force as the active power to destroy the stability of the contact interface between the ice and the substrate surface. During the experiment, ternary quadratic regression orthogonal experiment method was adopted to design the experiment conditions, like the range of the solution mass concentration and the size of the pits, and the mathematic model was set up to analyze the relationship between the experimental factors and the ice adhesion strength. The test used the 6061 aluminum alloy whose size is 60 mm × 60 mm × 6 mm as the sample material and took the laser processing or milling to fabricate the different sizes of pits. And the pits were full of different mass concentrations of ethanol solution. The sample surface was covered by the biaxially oriented polypropylene (the abbreviation is BOPP). The experimental results showed that the de-icing model significantly reduced the ice adhesion strength, and the different pit sizes and mass concentrations of filled ethanol solution had different effects on reducing the ice adhesion strength. When the pit diameter was 23.172 mm, the depth was 4.349 mm, and the pit was filled with 8.05% ethanol solution, the reduction rate of ice adhesion strength by the model was 92.72%. The regression analysis method was used to solve the regression equation. And the order of the influence of different experiment factors on decreasing ice adhesion strength was determined, which was pit depth, mass concentration of ethanol solution and pit diameter from high to low. The mechanism of the de-icing model was analyzed through the adopted regression equation. The paper considered that the freezing of solution in the pits would release the expansion energy in a short time and directly act on the freezing interface due to both rigid sides of the pit. The ethanol solution would contain more and more phase transformation energy with the increasing of the pit depth. The higher the energy density acting on the BOPP film, the greater the damage to the stability of the contact interface, the greater the ice adhesion strength decreased. When the mass concentration of ethanol solution in the pits was reduced, it would generate more expansion energy. That meant that the elastic film would bear more expansion force under the same conditions and it would increase the reduction rate of the ice adhesion strength. However, the decrease rate of the ice adhesion strength would not increase as the radius of the pit increasing. As the radius increased, the area of the expansion load acting on the contact interface would increase in square. Therefore, it decreased the power density on the BOPP film and the reduction rate would be reduced. The study takes the phase expansion force to improve the surface active characteristics of the refrigeration equipment and provides the experimental basis for developing the active de-icing method and a new thought for de-icing methods.