Investigation of longitudinal airflow characteristics in an aircraft cabin based on angle of attack

Abstract

As an important means of transportation, an aircraft’s environmental control system plays an important role in ensuring the health and thermal comfort of the cabin environment. To guarantee sufficient lift during flight, the aircraft cabin needs to have a certain angle of attack with the horizontal direction. In this study, the flow field, temperature field and vortex structure characteristics of the cabin were analysed using a scaled 28-row cabin model and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) under different angles of attack (15° and 8°) conditions. The results show that the velocity and temperature in the local area in the longitudinal section were increased when the angle of attack was increased. Compared with the horizontal state (angle of attack 0°), the longitudinal airflow under the condition of a larger angle of attack was enhanced. The overall trend of forward airflow is presented in this paper. The longitudinal airflow would strengthen the separation of the large vortex at the top of the cabin. The vortex structure shows high instability in different times and spaces.