Experimental Study On The Thermal-fluid Field In An Aircraft Cabin With Gaspers On

With the development of science, technology, civil aviation and the quickness of globalization progressing, more and more people are traveling by airliners. Because of the special inner environment of the cabin, the problems of occupant safety, healthy and comfort happen occasionally. Therefore, research on air distribution and contaminant transport in cabin, then putting forward better designing and operating method for the environment control system in airliners, is necessary for providing the safety, health and comfort for passengers. This research is affiliated to the TJU-Boeing project “Reliable experiment data and CFD model validation of air distribution and contaminant transport in a commercial aircraft cabin”.In order to provide reliable and high quality data for validating Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) models, it is essential to measure the boundary condition of gasper and high-resolution flow field in the economy-class cabin of a real MD-82 commercial airliner, and quantify the effects of personal gasper on airflow movement and temperature field and the transport of the contaminants and pathogens. These formed the objective to perform the research in this paper. An own-designed Ground Air-condition Cart(GAC) was used to supply long-period and constant temperature airflow. In order to guarantee a stable thermal boundary condition for the cabin, the aircraft fuselage was insulated by two-double layers of insulation material. A 1D robot that could move horizontally to carry a group of HSAs or UAs was used to measure the velocity at slot diffusers. A combination of Hot-Wire Anemometer(HWA) and 3D robot system were applied to obtain the velocity magnitude of the gaspers. T-type thermocouples and an infrared camera were used to measure the thermal boundary condition. UAs and temperature sampling tubes were placed parallel with the same distance interval on a 3D robot were applied to achieve the simultaneous measurements of velocity and temperature fields.The measured results showed that the velocity boundary conditions were very complicated. The velocity magnitude varies greatly from one slot to another. The total airflow of the gaspers is of about 5% of the total ventilation rate. But the supplied air from the gaspers had a more than 50m/s speed at the core and decay rapidly along the radial direction. And the jet of gasper can be reduced to the jet of circular cross-section vent. The airflow field in the cabin with gaspers on was affected synthetically by diffuser flow, gasper jet flow and thermal buoyancy. Because of the asymmetrical air supply velocity profile in the diffusers and gapers, the global airflow patterns and the local velocities between adjacent parallel planes are not identical. The temperature fields meet the requirements of ASHRAE standard 161. The change of the thermal boundary conditions had a huge impact on the distribution of airflow and temperature field. The repeatability test of the airflow field of eight sections shows that the average repeatable error is less than 30%.