Integrated inverse design of ventilation for an aircraft cabin

Abstract

Cabin ventilation is crucial for maintaining thermal comfort and air quality for passengers and crew. The genetic algorithm, proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), and adjoint method have been proposed to inversely design the cabin ventilation. However, each method has its cons and pros. This paper proposed to integrate the above three methods in cascades. The genetic algorithm was applied first in the first stage to roughly circumscribe the ranges of design parameters. Then POD was applied in the next stage to further narrow the ranges and estimate the optimal parametric sets for each design criterion. The estimated optimal design from POD was supplied to the adjoint method for fine tuning. The air-supply parameters of a five-row aircraft cabin were inversely designed to achieve the minimum absolute value of the predicted mean vote (PMV) and the minimum averaged mean age of air. The results showed that the integrated method was able to improve the design stage by stage. The integrated method has superior advantages to assure the optimal design while minimizing the computing expense.