New approaches for the environmental control system in aircrafts with the application of a vapor compression cycle.

State of the art in currently used commercial aircrafts is an environmental control system, which is based on the air cycle and driven by bleed air from the engine. The potential application of the vapor cycle in the aircraft air conditioning system offers different improvement opportunities and is investigated in a research project. In the design study pneumatically and electrically driven environmental control systems with different approaches for current (retrofit) and future aircrafts are developed. Various requirements and boundary conditions are considered. The calculation of the environmental control systems is realized with a detailed simulation model. The performance of the new systems is evaluated with a benchmark, which shows a considerable decrease of about 21% bleed air mass flow for the reference case on the ground and 25% for the operating case in flight, both at hot ambient conditions for the pneumatically driven system.