Research On A Novel Personalized Air Distribution System For Commercial Aircraft Cabins

Nowadays, more and more people are travelling by airliners than ever before. Therequest for a comfortable and healthy aircraft environment becomes higher and higher.A good design of air distribution system in commercial aircraft cabins is crucial forproviding a comfortable and healthy environment for passengers. The environment ofaircraft cabin is different from buildings and other enclosed spaces. Aircraft cabin hasan environment with higher occupancy, lower humidity, lower pressure and many aircontaminants, such as ozone, carbon monoxide, various organic chemicals, andbiological agents. In addition, the external environment has low pressure, lowtemperature and low humidity. So it is very challenging to design an ideal airdistribution system for commercial airplanes. The traditional mixing air distributionsystem is difficult to meet the comfortable and healthy requirements from passengers.About25%of the passengers were dissatisfied with the thermal comfort. Besides, ithas been found that cabin environment is associated with the international spread ofsome severe infectious disease such as SARS and HINI in the recent decades.In order to improve the environment for aircraft, this paper proposed a newpersonalized air distribution system. This research is affiliated to the TJU-973project―Reliable experimental data and CFD model validation of air distributions andcontaminant transport in a commercial aircraft cabin‖. It aims at creating a newpersonalized air distribution system to satisfy different demands of local thermalcomfort and air quality of passengers and to effectively improve the level of comfortand health of cabin environment.This research proposed a new personalized air distribution system based oncurrent situation of cabin and different demands of local thermal comfort and airquality from passengers. Then, this research simulated the air distributions of thepersonalized air distribution system and mixing air distribution system in a three-rowaircraft cabin. The simulation results of thermal comfort indices and contaminationfield of two air distribution systems showed the personalized air distribution systemcould provide a more comfortable and healthy environment for aircraft cabin. Finally, the research proposed a systematic process to evaluate the cabin environment whichcould be further used in some similar research in the future.