Emergency Evacuation Simulation of Large Civil Aircraft

The safety of passengers using transport aircraft is crucially dependent on the rapid evacuation of the cabin in the event of an emergency, and therefore, when new aircraft types are registered, the manufacturer must prove that the cabin can be evacuated within 90 seconds with the maximum number of passengers and in darkness. Only the doors and emergency exits on one fuselage side are available. Its mandatory verification by a certification test is costly and expensive for the manufacturers. Significant changes to an aircraft model could result in the need to re-test the emergency evacuation before implementation. As this a huge effort a method is necessary to predict the behavior of passengers as accurately as possible. In order to determine reliable evacuation times already during the aircraft preliminary design phase, numerical simulations of emergency evacuations are required. For this purpose, studies on the basis of various simulation algorithms have been carried out at the Chair of Aircraft Design and aerostructures within the framework of various Theses. In particular, it has to be ensured that human behavior can be assessed realistically within the simulation in order to achieve evacuation times as accurate as possible. The aim of this thesis is to examine to what extent the PATHFINDER software is suitable for the evacuation simulation of single-aisle and twin-aisle airliners, which could have an over wing exits. These are typically aircraft of the Airbus A320 or A340 family. Therefore, this thesis shall investigate to what extent numerical simulation methods are suitable for the evacuation simulation of commercial aircraft. This suitability shall be analyzed and evaluated with the help of the PATHFINDER tool with regard to the design of the cabin.