MULTI-ZONAL TEMPERATURE CONTROL OF TRANSIENT THERMAL LOADS IN AIRCRAFT CABIN AIRFLOW

Abstract

We developed, implemented and investigated a novel system for multi-zonal temperature control of transient thermal loads in mixing ventilation of passenger aircraft cabins using the Dornier 728 aircraft cabin test facility of the German Aerospace Center in Gottingen as test environment. The system comprises lightweight, PID-controlled heating tubes installed in front of each air inlet with a network of reference sensors and allows for temperature zones as small as a single seat row. We considered seven different heat load scenarios using 73 thermal passenger dummies and a fast switchable local heat source to simulate the heat release of the real passengers. By analysing the temperature signals of 340 resistance temperature detectors, we studied the propagation of locally released thermal loads as well as the impact of locally varied inflow temperatures. Further, we developed and investigated different sensor and controller network concepts to identify and address missing, additional and transient sources of heat. Averaged over all load scenarios, we found that our baseline case with spatially homogeneous inflow-temperatures yielded 14 % of seats with temperature deviations larger than 0.5°C from the column mean. By switching to multi-zonal control, we could reduce this number by almost one order of magnitude to 1.6 %.