Numerical Modelling of Aircraft Evacuations

The FAA regulation for safe aircraft evacuations requires a demonstration under specific conditions. The current demonstrations are performed without any computational models aiding the design prior to live testing. This project demonstrates how a numerical model can be used to simulate a much wider range of conditions to aid designers in picking a single design to proceed with. Our numerical model is created as an equivalent circuit with non-linear constitutive equations. Employing the model on an example baseline configuration shows the location of bottlenecks and the relative impact of obstacles in the evacuation path. When paired together, a physical demonstration and numerical model can more effectively ensure that an aircraft is capable of a safe evacuation in all conditions, compared to a physical demonstration alone.