Experimental Techniques for Measurement and Simulation of Aircraft Cabin Flows

Abstract

For the design of modern aircrafts passenger comfort plays an increasingly important role. For passenger thermal comfort the air velocity and temperature distribution is of utmost importance The development of numerical methods for these flows depends on the availibility of valuable and realistic test data. Characteristic for cabin flows is the superposition of natural convection due to various heat loads, like passengers or illumination and forced convection due to the ventilation system. In order to validate these effects the acquisition of full scale data is needed. In addition a realistic simulation of the passenger heat load that can be easily translated into a numerical model is needed. Since cabin airflow can be easily disturbed nonintrusive field measurements have to be used preferably. Therefore Mo et al. used Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) in a narrow body (737) aircraft cabin section on fields of view of 0.61m x 0.61 m. To simulate the thermal presence of passengers he used thermal manikins with internal heat sources and heated cylinders respectively. As seeding he tested neutrally boyant helium filled soap bubbles, but decided to use hollow microspheres because it was inpractical to inject enough bubbles into the cabin to maintain an adequate seeding density without disrupting the airflow pattern.