Influencing Factors And Evaluation Method Of Thermal Comfort In Commercial Aircraft Cabin

As the development of technology and people's living standard,more and more people choose airplane as a way of transportation.In recent 20 years,the civil aviation industry experienced a rapid progress including the number of aircrafts and passengers.However,the aircraft market is monopolized by Boeing and Airbus nowadays.Under this situation,our country has proposed the strategy of developing our own commercial aircraft and hopes to find a place in the fierce competition in the future.Comfort is becoming more and more important in modern aircraft cabins.This research mainly focuses on the thermal environment and passengers' thermal comfort in aircraft cabin.A large scale field investigation in aircraft cabin was conducted in this research due to the lack of understanding of passengers' thermal comfort.It was found that passengers' thermal comfort was significantly different in different seasons.Passengers in summer were the most comfortable and those in winter were the most uncomfortable.The main reason was that the adjustment of cabin temperature did not take the seasonal influence into account.Local thermal comfort was important in overall thermal comfort evaluation especially for head and back.Passengers were also active in self-adjustments and those with behavioral adjustments evaluated their thermal comfort worse than those without adjustments.Based on this field investigation,it can be determined that the proper cabin temperature is a key problem for cabin thermal comfort.Compared with building environment,the particularity of cabin environment is air pressure which could also influences thermal comfort.In this research,based on former studies,the influence of air pressure on human thermal comfort related parameters was investigated.In the cabin pressure range,thermal sensation,skin temperature and heart rate variability were not significantly affected while the consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide as well as the metabolic rate increased in low pressure conditions.Based on experiment data and combined with human thermal regulation theory,the quantitative description of pressure influence was given.The influence of pressure was also affected by air temperature.The ultimate purpose of this research is for airworthiness standards and cabin thermal comfort design.Based on the model developed in this research,a method to determine the comfortable temperature/relative humidity zone in cabin was put forward.The comfortable zone was validated by the field investigation data,which proved its reliability.