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This paper reviews reportable aviation incidents and associated cost losses. Aviation incidents include visible smoke incidents inside aircraft passenger cabins, occurrences of fumes and oily smells, and illness cases reported by flight crew members in 2012, for US based carriers for domestic flights and all international flights that either originated or terminated in the US. Cost losses include direct and indirect costs endured by different airlines due to diversions from the scheduled flight route, returns to departure airport, expedited arrival procedures, and cancellation of flights on ground. Two case study scenarios are presented to illustrate minimum and maximum costs limits. Sources used to collect data for this article include the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Aviation Administration online database, Research and Innovative Technology Administration database (RITA), and official airline websites.

An experimental study was performed in a mockup of a Boeing 767 cabin section consisting of eleven rows with seven seats per row. The ventilation system for the mockup is constructed for actual aircraft components and includes linear diffusers that extend the full length of the mockup. Ventilation flow rates representative of an actual aircraft were used for all experiments. Seats in the mockup were occupied by thermal manikins to simulate passenger heat load. A motorized beverage cart traversed the length of the right aisle. Tracer gas and smoke visualization were used to determine the effect of the moving cart on transport of contaminants in the cabin. Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) tracer gas was injected at a constant flow rate at a location adjacent to the aisle until concentrations in the cabin reach steady-state.

The integration of a thermal system for automotive applications is presented in this study. The integrated system is able to cool or heat the passenger cabin of a conventional automobile. Most cars use separate cooling and heating systems to control the cabin interior air temperature for passenger comfort. The cooling system uses a standard refrigeration loop to cool the cabin in summer while the heating system uses the heat supplied from the engine to warm the cabin in winter. However, in recent automotive applications with alternative fuel sources, such as fuel cell or direct-injection diesel engines, the heat rejected from the engine is not sufficient to warm the cabin in cold climates. On the other hand, the cooling system which normally uses a vapor compression refrigeration cycle is able to cool the cabin as desired shortly after starting the engine in warm climates.

Two state-of-the-art Thermal Observation Manikins were designed and built for use in automobile applications. These manikins not only apply the latest data acquisition and control technology but also incorporate new manufacturing and sensor technology for improved performance. Their unique design offers an important and a major improvement over previous manikin designs by incorporating heat flux transducers to measure heat fluxes to or from the environment, regardless of segment skin temperature. The end goal for these manikins is to incorporate a subjective model of thermal comfort along with a human thermal physiological model to produce a thermal sensation vote based on a combination of heat flux transducers, temperature sensors, and heater power measurements. This paper briefly discusses the details of the construction of the thermal observation manikins and their application for evaluation of thermal conditions in an automobile.

A unique measurement device, called StickMan, and a customized vehicle climate control system, were developed to measure thermal comfort under transient and non-uniform conditions inside vehicle. The systems were fully calibrated and then used to characterize the vehicle thermal environments (air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity, relative humidity) at 20 locations. Coupled with a seventeen segment version of the human thermal model TRANMOD (Jones and Ogawa, 1992), one can predict both whole body and local thermal sensation accurately based on the StickMan measurements. Therefore, using a device such as StickMan may reduce the design cycle and costs by eliminating the need of large number of human subjects to evaluate thermal comfort satisfaction in vehicle prototypes.