Novel Vapor Cycle Air Conditioning System for future aircraft

One of the most challenging problems of modern times to address is the environmental emergency. Also in the aviation sector, there is a huge commitment to the reduction of flight impact on nature. To achieve these goals, there is a necessity to implement innovative solutions to improve the overall efficiency of the aircraft. One of the biggest and most important systems is the Environmental Control System. The Environmental Control System (ECS) must ensure the comfort of passengers and crew throughout the operational envelope and for the whole duration of the mission. It is of extreme importance for the survival of the occupants and has to maintain temperature, pressure, flows, humidity, and cabin air quality within a required range. The ECS is also one of the main consumers of non-propulsive power available. For this reason, the choice of the more suitable ECS architecture plays a key role in the increase of aircraft efficiency, reduction in block fuel burnt, and, as a consequence, reduction of the emission in the environment. Conventional state-of-the-art ECS involves air cycle machines based architecture. Despite the good levels of performance obtainable with this type of technology, Airbus wanted to explore different configurations with a change of perspective. In particular, the technology of the vapor cycle is the one that seems to be the more promising for the application of air conditioning systems for future aircraft. The thesis work focuses on the modelling and integrated design optimisation of Airbus' electrically-driven architecture based on the vapor cycle to investigate the feasibility, the advantages, and the limits. The work also includes the implementation of a graphical user interface GUI to have a better visualisation of the performance.