Personalized ventilation for commercial aircraft cabins

Complaints about cabin air quality and persistent reports of spreading infections on commercial flights indicate that continued investigations of cabin air systems and effective measures to improve cabin air quality are required. This study used a computational fluid dynamics technique to investigate the dispersion characteristics of sneezed/coughed particles by both the Eulerian and Lagrangian methods. These particles can be transported to a location more than three rows in front of the sneezing person, and less than 20% of the particles were exhausted, whereas the remainders are deposited owing to the high surface-to-volume ratio. Personalized ventilation, through the distribution of fresh air directly in the breathing zone, was able to shield up to 60% of air pollutants in a passenger's inhalation.