# Icing Mitigation by MEMS-Fabricated Surface Dielectric Barrier Discharge
## 1 Introduction  
Preventing ice buildup on aerodynamic components is of primary importance to flight safety [1, 2]. Ice accumulates especially on the front components of an aircraft, severely limiting its performance by increasing drag and decreasing lift. The prevention of ice formation is often referred as an anti-icing and the removal of already present ice as a de-icing. Current investigated technologies such as liquid-based systems [3], pneumatic systems [4, 5], thermal systems [6] or electro-thermal systems [7, 8] cover a wide range of research areas. Whereas the related topic of plasma actuators (PA) for flow control applications is widely studied [9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20], there is recently a growing interest in the study of surface dielectric barrier discharges (SDBDs) as an anti-icing and de-icing system [21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30]. Probably [PERSON] et al. [24] and [PERSON] et al. [21] were the first who reported experimental results indicating that SDBDs can work as an anti/de-icing system. They used Kapton foils wrapped around a cylinder with copper tape as electrodes. The ice protection effect is explained by a temperature increase of the surface measured by a thermal imaging camera. [PERSON] et al. [22] used acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS shells) as dielectric for SDBDs andmounted it on an airfoil. They concluded that the anti-icing with SDBDs is more efficient compared to ohmic heating systems, even accounting that the main power consumption of SDBD also depends on the efficiency of its power supply. [PERSON] et al. and [PERSON] et al. (2013); [PERSON] et al. (2015) investigated different geometries and concluded that a streamwise layout, where the electrodes are orientated along the flow is better for anti-icing than a spanwise layout (electrodes orthogonal to the flow). They suggest that this effect can be caused by the 70 \(\upmu\)m thick copper electrodes, which significantly increases the surface roughness and induce premature turbulences on the wing disturbing the laminar flow, through which the SDBD generated heat is transported away from the surface ([PERSON] et al., 2015). [PERSON] et al. (2016) compared the SDBD-plasma heating with electric heating in a droplet-evaporation study by applying the same surface temperature. They could show that plasma heating was 6.5 times faster and, in addition, that the plasma seems to evaporate water droplets on the surface by subsequently dividing water drops into smaller and smaller droplets. [PERSON] et al. (2017) proposed a nanosecond pulse operated SDBD (nSDBD) heat knife with a stream-wise electrode configuration. Their nSDBD locally cuts the ice which is then blown away by the passing air flow. The use of such a heat knife is particularly conceivable at the leading edge of an aerodynamic component. [PERSON] et al. (2018) investigated the heat generation mechanism of SDBDs in more detail and assumed that materials with a high permittivity generate heat more efficiently, whereas the dissipation factor plays only a minor role. This study shows that the de- and anti-icing effect is influenced by the discharge geometry as well as the materials being used. A full understanding of the impact of such properties is still missing. The goal of the present work was to examine Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology fabricated actuators for anti/de-icing applications. The ability to manufacture SDBDs with extremely thin and fine structured electrodes is the main advantage of the MEMS-technology. However, the thin electrodes can exhibit strong erosion under the aggressive discharge environment ([PERSON] et al., 2018). Minimization of electrode erosion is the main challenge MEMS-technology has to deal with. For this purpose our previous studies on the electrode material ([PERSON] et al., 2018) were expanded in this work. The degradation of the dielectric material can be avoided by using inorganic substrates ([PERSON] et al., 2018).