Aircraft Cabin Interior

As airlines compete on passenger experience, every commercial jet boasts specific styles of passenger seats, galleys, luggage compartments, side and ceilings panels in economy cabins and business class.

Cabin interior features must be designed and manufactured to be aesthetically attractive and comfortable for passengers but remain lightweight to reduce fuel consumption per flight.

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence’s simulation and analysis software tools help aircraft cabin designers to optimise the use of new materials such as composites and utilise processes like additive manufacturing and plastic injection moulding to create lightweight parts accurately.

Because flying at altitude involves pressurising the cabin, heating the cabin and increasing cabin humidity, it can be a real challenge to simulate and optimise the environment onboard an aircraft. Hexagon’s computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software offering includes a unique method to account for human body temperature within these calculations, bringing simulations closer to reality.

With the aerospace industry predicted to double in size in the next 20 years, cabin interior panels and seats must be produced at high rates while reducing costs and time.

From a production point of view, interior side and ceiling panels do not require the highest accuracies in comparison to other aircraft components. However, the part volumes are high and surface finishing is important to the cabin aesthetic, as is gap and flush alignment during installation. Hexagon’s specialised tools for fit and finish are increasingly used to support this phase of cabin interior fitting.

With tens of thousands of new single aisle aircraft expected to be produced in the next fifteen years with an average of 150 seats each, production lines are becoming more automated. Hexagon’s in-line tactile and non-contact measurement solutions can support quick dimensional checks of the seat components and the assembled seats’ quality.