Personalized ventilation for commercial aircraft cabins

Thermal environments in commercial aircraft cabins are essential for the health and comfort of passengers. Flight-related symptoms, complaints on cabin air quality, and nonstop reports on infections in commercial flights in the past decades arouse more cautious investigations on cabin air systems and effective measures to improve them. This study adopted a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to simulate air flow field, temperature field, and pollutant concentration field in a five-seat-row section of an aircraft. The dispersion characteristics of sneezed/coughed particles were modeled by both Eulerian and Lagrangian method. These particles can be transported to a location more than three rows in front of the sneezing person and only about 20% of the particles were exhausted before deposition owing to the high surface-to-volume ratio. Personalized ventilation, through distributing fresh air directly in the breathing zone, was able to protect the user from polluted inhalation, by shielding up to 60% of the pollutants.