Deicing Performance Of Carbon Fiber Heating Wires Embedded In Concrete Pavement

Recently, the advantages of the application of carbon fiber heating wires (CFHWs) embedded in concrete pavement for deicing has been widely recognized, and many experimental studies have been carried out. Restricted to the test conditions, however, the researches are greatly limited, which makes the test results show instable. Therefore, numerical analysis was conducted to investigate the deicing performance of carbon fiber heating wires (CFHWs) embedded in concrete pavement. Finite element model was established using the general-purpose software ANSYS thermal analysis module, based on which a total of1440temperature-time responses of concrete pavement embedded with CFHW were simulated for different conditions. In the analysis, the influence of factors, including CFHW spacing, ambient temperature, wind scale, thickness of ice and input power, was considered. Based on the study, following conclusions can be drawn:(1) According to thermodynamics, the process of heat transfer, heat convection and phase transformation of the system that CFHWs embedded in concrete pavement was analyzed. The applicable model element and boundary condition employed for thermal analysis in ANSYS were determined. Considering that the ice is melt in layer-by-layer processing, the meshing of model elements was optimized to take both the efficiency and precision of calculating into account.(2) The proposed model and calculating procedure were verified by comparing with tests on the concrete slab indoors and outdoors。(3) The deicing time of the system is proportional to CFHW spacing, ambient temperature, and input power, while is inversely proportional to thickness of ice and wind scale. The deicing efficiency of the system is influenced with mentioned factors, while the CFHW spacing and input power have a greater impact. When other factors keep constant, with the increase of the thickness of ice, the effect of wind scale on the deicing efficiency of the system decreases.(4) The deicing time for different conditions were concluded, which could provide useful information for engineering design. When factors including CFHW spacing, ambient temperature, wind scale and the thickness of ice are known, the input power can be determined according to the requirement of deicing time.