Climatic Ice Adhesion Test Chamber

This work was a part of my masters thesis and consisted of designing a cooled chamber that houses a system capable of determining the ice adhesion strength of any surface for the production of icephobic coatings.

TEST CHAMBER

The chamber consists of a small chest freezer to cool the environment, and a wooden structure to house all mechanical components and for the access door.

MECHANICAL DRIVE SYSTEM

The test rotor is mounted to a shaft protruding through the freezer's wooden lid and connects to a v-belt which is being driven by an electric motor

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ICED ROTOR

Test surfaces are applied on one side of a flat bar rotor along with a ice cube. The opposing side of the rotor has a counterweight of equal mass to balance the rotor. As the rotor spins increasingly faster, the ice will eventually detach which induces vibrations.

VIBRATION SENSOR

Vibrations are captured by the sensor, mounted radially on the bearing, which provides the indicator of when the ice has detached from the surface.

Centrifuge Adhesion test output data

Using the vibrations sensor output, rotational velocity of the rotor can be determined at the exact instant ice detaches to calculate centrifugal force and the resulting ice adhesion strength.

COMPUTATION

Vibrations and rotational velocity outputs were sent to an Arduino Uno for computing and data manegement. Vibrations came directly from the sensor however rotational velocity was estimated using the variable frequency drive and multiplied by the sheave belt ratio. Data was exported to excel for management and analysis.