Conceptual development of an ergonomic passenger seat and cabin design for single aisle transport airship

Recently, there have been progressive interests in having airships as alternative mass passenger air transportation means. Many research studies have been conducted so far on the external shape and structural design of passenger transport airships; however, there is little emphasis placed on the internal passenger cabin designs. This is despite the fact that passenger comfort is widely acknowledged as one of the main criteria to attract passengers for the flying services. Current passenger cabin designs that have been operated or envisioned for passenger transport airships are either too luxurious or too compact, which are not suitable to be used onboard a mass passenger transport airship with anticipated similar capacity to a commercial transport aircraft. Therefore, there exists a clear design gap that becomes the driving motivation to be addressed by this study. Subsequently, the research objectives are to establish cabin design factors that contribute to the improvement of passengers’ comfort level, conceptually develop an ergonomic passenger seat design that could provide an adequate comfort level for passengers of a mass passenger transport airship and conceptually develop optimal passenger cabin for mass passenger transport airships using fuzzy logic method. The passenger seat and cabin are designed and developed based on identified design factors that influence the passengers’ comfort level during flight, which are obtained from the conducted focus group study and experts’ interviews. A standard engineering design process is performed to generate and select the best design alternative for the passenger seat. The proposed seat design is ergonomically analysed using standard Rapid Upper Lumbar Assessment (RULA) analysis method to determine its adequacy in providing improved comfort level to the passengers, which in this study is focused on the Malaysian public. This passenger seat design is subsequently used in overall passenger cabin design optimization process using the fuzzy design method. From the results of conducted focus group and expert interviews, the major cabin design factors that contribute towards passengers’ flight comfort have been identified as seat’s height, width, pitch, depth, backrest inclination and colour (chromatic and achromatic), cabin’s length, width and colour (chromatic and achromatic), and also the aisle width. The identified factors are highly considered throughout the conceptual design process of the proposed passenger seat and cabin for mass passenger transport airship. From RULA analysis results based on 10 established common sitting postures of the flying passengers, the proposed seat design is shown to be able to provide an improved seating comfort level. Furthermore, the final optimized passenger cabin design obtained from the fuzzy evaluation process has been found to be adequately ergonomic and in good compliance with the governing regulations. This proposed passenger cabin design has also received positive feedback from the airship experts who were consulted in this study. All in all, the optimal passenger cabin design that has been proposed in this study can be applied to ensure that the available onboard space of the airships is optimized for the benefits of both the operator and passengers. In addition, the proposed passenger seat design is tailored to provide better comfort for passengers while in compliance with the essential aviation regulations involving its design for the mass passenger transport airships. Last but not least, the final contribution of this study lies in the construction of the membership functions and fuzzy rules, which are made with great consultations from experts in airship industry. This indicates that these membership functions and fuzzy rules are highly reflective of current practices in the industry and can be therefore extended for use in the cabin design of the other airships as well.

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