Simplifying the geometry of an airliner cabin for CFD simulations

To study air distribution in commercial aircraft cabins so as to analyze their indoor air quality and thermal comfort, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been frequently used. This study obtained a detailed geometric model by a laser tracking system with reverse engineering for the first-class section of an MD-82 aircraft cabin. By performing CFD simulations for the geometric model with different simplifications and by comparing the numerical results, the differences caused by the simplifications could be estimated. Our numerical simulations used the RNG k-ε model to solve the air distributions. This study concluded that some cabin geometries, such as the windows and seats, can be greatly simplified. Simplification could significantly reduce the grid number that makes the simulations faster.