Investigation of thermal comfort on innovative personalized ventilation systems for aircraft cabins: A numerical study with computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

Airliner passengers are more and demanding in terms of thermal comfort. But it is not yet easy for crew to control the environment control system (ECS) that satisfies the thermal comfort for most travelers due to a number of reasons. It is, therefore, essential to develop the existing design of air circulation system for aircraft cabins. This work proposed six innovative personalized ventilation systems (PVSs) that would maintain thermal comfort to improve the cabin micro-environment. This study first validated a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program with the experimental data of airflow and air temperature from an environmental chamber. Then the validated CFD program was used to calculate the air velocity, air temperature, relative humidity (RH) and examined the thermal comfort in a section of Boeing 767 aircraft cabin with the six innovative PVSs. By comparing the six PVSs in terms of relative humidity, velocity, temperature, predicted mean vote (PMV), predicted percentage dissatisfaction (PPD) and age of air (AoA), this study found that the proposed systems provided an acceptable thermal environment aircraft cabin. The personal outlets configuration at both sides of the passenger head (PVS-1) was the best; it can improve the RH by 12% without the risk of air drafts, and it also has a standard PMV (0.2) and PPD (<15%) range.