2D-PIV measurement of aircraft cabin air distribution with a high spatial resolution

Mixing air ventilation systems are currently used in commercial airplane environmental control systems (ECS), which are essential to create a safe, healthy and thermally comfortable cabin environment. To evaluate the performance of cabin air distributions, the first step is to quantify how the airflow gets distributed within cabins. In this investigation, a large-scale particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurement was performed to characterize the mixing air distributions inside a partially transparent aircraft cabin mockup. The PIV measurement was performed at a total of 5 large sub-regions each with size of 975 mm × 650 mm to obtain the global flow field within one cross section. Both the systematic errors and statistical errors of the PIV measurement were analyzed. The air distributions in the cabin mockup were measured under both isothermal condition and cooling condition. The results indicated that the cabin airflows were of low velocities and high turbulence levels. Then we studied the influence of the cold air jets and the thermal plumes on the global airflow pattern. The distributions of velocity, vorticity and turbulence intensity under the two conditions were also analyzed and compared in detail. The data obtained from this study will be useful to characterize the detailed airflow information in passenger aircraft cabin environment and to validate corresponding numerical simulations.