Design Optimization of Heating-Pad with Hot-Air Path in Square-Grid Shape for Road Surface Deicing: A Simulation Study

The ice formation on a road surface can easily lead to traffic accidents.Therefore, a method of melting ice with a heating pad using for road is proposed.In order to obtain the best ice-melting effect, a heating pad whose volume is fixed is taken as the object of study.The melting speed and melting uniformity on the working surface of the heating pad are taken as the evaluation indicators, and the length, thickness and gas path spacing of the heating pad, are the optimization parameters.The thermal flow simulation analysis is performed by means of a uniform design response surface method to obtain the functional relationship between the evaluation indicators and the structural parameters.The genetic algorithm is used for multi-objective optimization to obtain a non-inferior solution set.The optimal point method TOPSIS is used to select the optimal solution.It is concluded that when the diameter of the gas path is 20 mm, the best combination of parameter values is 48 mm between the gas paths, 68 mm for the thickness of the heating pad, and the lateral length can be determined according to engineering application.