A Modelling Study on the Impact of Luggage and Airworthiness Certification on Aircraft Evacuation

Abstract: Real-life aircraft evacuation drills can cost up to 2 million USD and may not at the same time be able to represent a real emergency scenario. with the use of evacuation models as a complement to the testing may reduce this cost. The aim of this thesis is to test the capabilities and limitation of two continuous evacuation models, namely Pathfinder and FDS + Evac in representing aircraft evacuation scenarios. The simulations were conducted considering six different scenarios which included 90s certification scenario and rapid deplaning with and without luggage and were simulated in an Airbus A320. The simulation work highlights the required user calibration effort to consider the narrow spaces in aircraft evacuation modelling scenarios. It also concludes that evacuation models allow the quantification of the impact of luggage on an increased total evacuation time by almost 8 % for Pathfinder and 2.5 % for FDS+Evac. The work highlighted the limitations both models possess in representing the narrow geometry of an Aircraft due to the use of 2D space representation and the use of rigid bodies. However, models such as Pathfinder allow behavioural itineraries which is more suitable for representing luggage collection.