Assessment of turbulence models and air supply opening models for CFD modelling of airflow and gaseous contaminant distributions in aircraft cabins

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Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an important and effective tool to study the airflow field and contaminant distribution in aircraft cabins. The accuracy of numerical simulation using the CFD approach could be significantly affected by configurations of the inlet boundary conditions, turbulence model, etc. The core of this study was to assess whether conclusions achieved in simulation of airflow on usual surfaces in buildings like in commercial offices could be applicable to aircraft cabins. Comparative studies involving turbulence models or air supply opening models in aircraft cabin environment are still absent in the literature. Therefore, in this study, two turbulence models (the renormalization group (RNG) k-ɛ model and Reynolds-stress model) and three types of air supply opening models (simple open model, basic model and momentum model) were applied to simulate the airflow and contaminant concentration fields in a mockup seven-row cabin section. Our simulation results were compared with the experimental data. Six indexes based on different criteria were used to quantitatively evaluate the agreement between measurements and modelled results given by turbulence models and air supply opening models. The results show that the RNG k-ɛ and RSM turbulence models have similar accuracy in airflow and contaminant fields in the mockup cabin, and the momentum model has the best accuracy among the three air supply opening models for the aircraft cabin environment.