Research On De-icing Of Power Line Using CO₂ Laser

Icing is a kind of severe nature disaster for electric power system, because of frequent happening of icing disaster, the department of electric power has explored all kinds of methods of anti-icing; the global have invested much to survey the icing of power line and study the methods of de-icing. Base on the technological principle, the main methods are divided into: mechanical methods based on the melting of the ice, thermal methods based on the breaking down of the ice and passive methods based on nature forces. The mechanical methods based on mechanical shocks or impact resist the ice from power lines; the thermal methods take use of heat to melt ice; the passive methods are those which do not require any external energy supply other than from natural forces. So far, there are even no high efficient methods for power line de-icing, especially insulator, so we will concentrate on it.Base on the heat source model, we analyze the heat transmission process and heat stress with ANSYS when CO2 laser irradiate ice. To enhance the efficiency of de-icing to meet the electric power department of online de-icing, we use CO2 laser in experiment. Firstly, we irradiate directly the power line insulator using CO2 laser, and get a damage threshold power of 86.6 w /cm 2; then we irradiate the ice using 50W and 500W CO2 laser to melt down ice through heat energy, to melt down ice of 1kg, it needs 349KJ, 117 minutes and 734KJ, 25 minutes. For its low efficiency, we developed heat and self-weight desquamation method using 35W laser, and irradiate the tangency of ice and insulator, reduce its felting force to desquamate the ice wholly, through measurement it needs 90KJ and 26 minutes.Results show that, the heat and self-weight desquamation method is more efficient, to de-ice the iced insulator more efficiently, we need to consider the laser power, the diameter of laser beam, so as to protect the insulator of electric power lines from damage when de-icing.