A Review about Thermal Comfort in Aircraft

Thermal comfort is an important factor which affects both work efficiency and life quality. On the basis of satisfying the normal life of the crew and reliable work of equipment, the thermal comfort is increasingly pursued through the design of the environmental control system of modern craft. Thus, a comprehensive survey of the thermal comfort in the cockpit is carried out. First of all, factors affecting the thermal comfort in aircraft cabin are summarized, including low relative humidity, mean radiant temperature, colored light, human metabolic rate and gender, among which the first three factors are environmental factors and the other two are human factors. Although noise is not a factor affecting thermal comfort, it is an important factor in the overall satisfaction of the aircraft cabin environment. Then the thermal comfort prediction models are introduced, including thermal comfort models suitable for steady state uniform environment and thermal comfort models suitable for transient non-uniform environment. Then the limitations of the typical thermal comfort models applied to aircraft are discussed. Since the concept of thermal adaptation has been gradually accepted in recent years, many field studies on thermal adaptation have been carried out. Therefore, the adaptive thermal comfort models are summarized and analyzed systematically in this paper. At present, mixing ventilation (MV) system is widely used in most commercial aircraft. However, the air quality under the MV system is very poor, and contaminants cannot be effectively eliminated. So a noticeable shift is the design of ventilation system for cabin drawing lessons from the surface buildings. Currently, the most interesting question is that whether the traditional mixing ventilation (MV) system in an aircraft can be replaced by or combined with displacement ventilation (DV) system without decreasing thermal comfort. A reduction of energy consumption is a valuable gain. Additionally, various seat personalized ventilation systems have also been proposed which could effectively reduce the risk of infectious diseases. At present, optimal design of airflow in aircraft cabin is the most commonly used method to enhance thermal comfort and save energy. The optimal design of the aircraft cabin colored lighting system, however, is also worth trying.