Modeling Environmental Control System for Aircraft by Coupling with Thermal Environment in Air Cabin

摘要

This investigation implemented the mathematical models for the thermodynamics processes for key components of the environmental control system (ECS) for an airliner to commercial software,ANSYS Simplorer.The PID control method available in ANSYS Simplorer was used to realize the dynamic control of the supplied air temperature to the cabin.ANSYS Fluent,a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program,was applied to simulate the air thermal environment,i.e.,the distributions of air temperature and air velocity,in the air cabin.The two programs were coupled for the simulation of the ECS operation and the thermal environment in the cabin for an entire flight process.The test results show that the coupled simulation can effectively exchange the data between the two programs under the coupling algorithms and the coupled simulation was stable and converged.The PID control can maintain a cabin air temperature within ±0.7 K of the setting point,and the distributions of cabin air temperature and velocity are reasonable.The results show that the models built in ANSYS Simplorer and Fluent are reasonably good and can be used in practice.