Numerical study on the effect of a standing person on airflow instability in a single-aisle aircraft cabin

Abstract

The instantaneous airflow with low velocity and high fluctuation within an aircraft cabin significantly influences the thermal comfort and safety of passengers. In this work, a numerical investigation of the effect of a standing person on the instability of airflow under mixed ventilation in the aircraft cabin was carried out. Based on the multi-GPU platform, the multi-relaxation time hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann method (MRT-HTLBM) with a high grid resolution (190 million) system was employed to conduct a large eddy simulation (LES). A high computational efficiency about 2153 MLUPS (Million Lattice Updates Per Second) was obtained by 4-GPU acceleration. Results demonstrate that when there is no person in the aisle, the airflow shows a temporal instability, exhibiting a quasi-periodic oscillation pattern characterized by an alternating left-right swing, and such an oscillation pattern is consistent in the cross-section of each row. The PD value of passengers on both sides of the aisle constantly change with the swing of the air. When a person stands in the aisle, the left-right consistent oscillation pattern is broken and the airflow shows a spatial instability. Under this situation, the presence of turbulent vortices around the seated passengers becomes more pronounced and the formation of the self-locking mode of the air is more probable than the situation with no person standing in the aisle. The temporal and spatial scales of the largest vortex near the seated passengers on both sides of the aisle increase by approximately 43.6 % and 38.2 %, respectively.