Ice accretion presents a major threat for performance and safety of aircraft. Electrothermal Ice Protection Systems present a reliable and flexible alternative to protect critical parts against it. Their main drawback is the high power consumption especially when operating in fully evaporative anti-ice mode. In this work, a genetic algorithm was deployed to optimize the power distribution on the fixed heaters of an electrothermal ice protection system for an airfoil operating in fully evaporative anti-ice mode. The GA is crossover based with a large population and no mutation. The reduction of the overall power consumption is sought. The objective function was constrained with the no-formation of ice in any location of the airfoil. The constraint has been included into the objective function by means of a penalty function. The freezing mass rate is numerically computed by means of the in-house developed code PoliMIce. The best solution encountered, could reduce the power consumption by 13.6% with respect to an intuitive design from literature. Moreover, the optimal layout of heat fluxes reduces the convective losses which are inefficiencies of the system.

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