Advances in human-machine cooperation-based aircraft artificial environment assessment and regulation technologies

Abstract

With the springing up of new technologies and materials in aircraft, the thermal management of aircraft is facing the dilemma of heat load increase and effective heat sink decrease. Hence the limiting factor of certain advanced aircraft is gradually changing from fuel to heat, and increasing emphasis on addressing the issue of aircraft environmental control should be placed. To reduce the energy consumption and improve the endurance of aircraft systems, this study reviews the development of aircraft environmental control technologies and analyzes the solutions in a human-machine cooperative manner. The comfortable temperature and humidity for personnel is generally between 18∼29 °C and 20 %∼30 % respectively, and the normal working temperature of equipment is usually 15∼90 °C. Using multiple indexes to evaluate the personnel comfort, equipment cooling and system energy consumption levels of existing aircraft environmental control technologies, it is found that the environmental needs of personnel and equipment cabin can be basically met with significant progress made in various technologies, e.g. equipment cooling, dehumidification and humidification, anti-freeze defrost and etc. Whereas there is rare research on the energy cascading utilization technology for human-machine synergistic environment and there exists challenges in applying the environmental control technology for cooling high-powered equipment to the personnel cabin. Finally, it is proposed that the future aircraft environmental control should develop cascading energy utilization, efficient cooling and shared control technologies, to take advantages of the human-machine collaborative regulation and cope with the challenges caused by transient thermal load impacts on the system.