Aircraft cabin thermal comfort evaluation using numerical manikins

There is a worldwide trend for the evaluation of internal thermal comfort in aircraft cabins. Even nowadays one of the major difficulties found is the development and application of a standardized index of internal thermal comfort evaluation in the complex environment of a passenger cabin. The objective of this paper is the CFD model description to evaluate the thermal environment in an aircraft passenger cabin and its results. For this, a digital thermal manikin was developed. Experimental and numerical global heat transfer coefficients were compared. Precision of less than 10% was achieved. In this evaluation five turbulent models were tested. Latter, two numerically calibrated manikins were put into a typical cabin. As a comfort index it was used the equivalent temperature for eighteen body segments. A study of the manikin equivalent temperatures with the aircraft on the ground, in cruise and with low ventilation conditions is presented. It was possible to verify a significant thermal asymmetry on the passenger near the window due to radiation heat loss by the fuselage. It was also noticed the importance to take into account the radiation heat exchange on the setting of the air condition set points for these conditions.