State of art on commercial aircrafts cabin passive insulation system consists in affixing insulation material between the outer skin and the interiors sidewall panel of the cabin. Usually, primary insulation is arranged on the outer skin, while a second insulation, the secondary insulation, is arranged on the interiors sidewall panels.
Most recent application on some Business Jet aircraft incorporates new generation foams shaped in such a way to be as much as possible tight to the fuselage structure ; They provide weight savings, improved handling/installation characteristics and enhanced performance durability in service compared to traditional insulation, resulting in lower operating and life cycle costs even if an higher purchasing cost.
SAT community aircrafts state of art on cabin passive insulation is even behind the above described situation. Apart from the business jet category, the general aviation aircraft are notoriously noisy inside the cabin. Small planes, by definition, have a lot less of these sound and thermal absorbent materials compared to the commercial or business jet aircraft, and are louder for this reason alone. The majority of today's commercial aircraft level of cabin noise is generally lower than 80 dBA, however, in smaller aircrafts the levels are considerably higher, 90 dBA and above.
SPAIN Project firstly aims at closing the gap with the commercial aircrafts state of art in terms of materials and integration methodologies adopted for the cabin passive insulation system.
As a second issue but directly tied with the materials and integration choice, SPAIN aims at improving the actual average General Aviation community cabin thermal and acoustic comfort standard requirements keeping low the weight associated with the cabin insulation system. This will be obtained by looking at the thermal and acoustic issues for the cabin as a whole and by making extensive use of analysis, both thermal and acoustic, with a Validation and Verification approach to reduce tests and prototyping cost.
