A Thermodynamic Study of Air Cycle Machine for Aeronautical Applications

Abstract

This work focuses on a thermodynamic study of an air cycle machine (ACM) for aircraft air-conditioning purposes. The ACM configuration mainly includes two compact heat exchangers, a compressor and an expander. The energy to drive this machine comes from the compressed air bleed from the compressor of the aircraft propulsion turbine. Some design features that affect the ACM performance will be studied: aircraft Mach number, cabin altitude, cabin recirculated air temperature and the percentage of the turbine work absorbed by the exhaust fan. Results showed that the computational tool implemented to solve the ACM mathematical model allows an understanding of the air cycle machine performance when flight aircraft and cabin human comfort parameters are changed to attain an optimized aircraft environmental control system (ECS) design

Keywords

• Air-conditioning; air cycle machine (ACM); environmental control system (ECS); coefficient of performance (COP).

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