Airliner Cabin Environment Research at Boise State

PI: Dr. Sin Ming Loo
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ever been sick after a trip to paradise? Thought about the quality of the air you breathe on the airplane?

Commercial airplane passengers and crews breathe a mixture of outside and re-circulated air, similar to the air in many homes and offices (Fig. 1). But the cabin environment is unique, due to the proximity of the passengers, the need for cabin pressurization, the low humidity, and the potential for exposure to common chemical and biological contaminants, all in an enclosed structure. That’s why the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) established the Center of Excellence for Airliner Cabin Environment Research (ACER) to examine cabin air quality and study chemical and biological threats in airliners.

	ACER consists of an eight institution team, including Auburn University, Purdue University, Harvard University, Boise State University, Kansas State University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. This team brings the diverse expertise necessary to conduct research on all facets of airliner cabin environment. ACER will conduct a comprehensive and integrated program of research and development on the cabin environment.
Figure 1. Bleed air system used by most commercial aircraft (US GAO, Aviation Safety: More Research Needed to the Effects of Air Quality on Airliner Cabin Occupants, GAO-04-54, 2005).
This will include the healthfulness of the cabin environment for passengers and crew, enhancement of aircraft environmental control systems, detection and mitigation of chemical, and biological threats aboard aircraft. ACER will also assist FAA to define state-of-art sensors for cabin use where the sensors could be commercial off-the-shelf, government off-the-shelf, or near market (academia and industry.

Boise State University’s role is to help the team build a sensor system backbone that is scalable and evolvable, and that can handle the input from multiple environmental air quality, chemical and biological sensors. Our research tasks involve backbone design and fabrication, evaluation of implementation issues, and finally, system testing. We will use reconfigurable hardware because it is characterized by the property that its low-level logical functionality is not determined at the time of manufacture, but rather becomes set only shortly before or during the invocation of the targeted application. Field-programmable gate arrays ( (FPGAs) (shown at right) are popular off-the-shelf reconfigurable hardware devices that we will use for this purpose.