The meaning of "HEACE"

The name "HEACE" is an acronym, standing for Health Effects in Aircraft Cabin Environment.

Key objectives

HEACE aims to achieve a better understanding of the health and comfort impact of the working environment inside aircraft on the crew. This understanding will be translated into improvements, to be promoted by defining appropriate schemes and measures (e.g. improved guidelines) for aircraft design. European manufacturers will thus be provided with clearer concepts and assessment tools with respect to the cabin/cockpit environment, in order to increase the "friendliness" of this workplace. This will mean direct benefits in relation to health and comfort, achieved by improving the overall quality of the cabin environment for crew and passengers. In addition, indirect benefits are expected through reduction of errors due to poor environments, thus supporting the safety of passengers and crew in this important means of transportation.

Click HERE to download a PDF-document, containing a short description of HEACE, it's aims and the contributing partners.

Specific Programme / Call

The international RTD project HEACE responds to the Call of Key Action 4: "New Perspectives in Aeronautics" in the December 2000 issue of the GROWTH Work Programme 2001 - 2002, and is funded by the European Community. (Competitive and Sustainable Growth Programme (1998 - 2002)) HEACE focuses on the development of tools aimed at "Improving Environmental Friendliness of Aircraft" (4.3) and particularly "Cabin Environment" (4.3.3). HEACE addresses the research and development tasks identified in Technology Platform 7 (4.11). It applies a broad concept of subjective comfort, including both acute health effects and environmental comfort, both of which affect the performance of the crew.

Partners

A more detailed description of the HEACE consortium and the participating partners can be found here.

Project timetable

HEACE was schedules to run for three years from November 2001 to October 2004 and has been prolongued until end of April 2005.

Community Added Value

The ability to produce a more comfortable and safer aircraft is in line with current community values, since it would aim to protect and secure end-users and consumers. The applied research carried out in the HEACE project will produce a tool-set that will promote the design of more "friendly" aircraft, according to defined guidelines for specific on-board workplaces. Public demand for better cabin environments will be met, against a background of an increasing need for air travel. By anticipating legislation and international regulations, to begin early with necessary improvements on health conditions inside aircraft, European manufacturers will be able to design and offer higher quality and more advanced products than competitors The competitiveness of European products will thus be enhanced.

Technical and Scientific Objectives; Innovative Aspects

Desirable environmental conditions for workplaces are generally well defined but there is a lack of recommendations or guidelines for the specific cases of aircraft cockpit and cabin environments. Manufactures rely on their own quality metrics, if they have any explicit requirements at all. The impact of environmental parameters (such as noise, vibration, temperature and air quality on health and comfort) is known in general but not for the specific boundary conditions of the interior of an aircraft. The potential impact on the performance of the crew is even less well understood. Also, little is known of the trade-off and rating of these parameters in the cabin and cockpit, for example the effect of change in one parameter on overall comfort and health. A limited quantitative evaluation was recently achieved for sound and vibration only, inside cars and an aircraft (both in EU projects, in which some HEACE partners were involved). Additional knowledge on combined parameters has been obtained in investigations of comfort and well-being in buildings. HEACE will evaluate the multidimensional state of comfort perception, in particular with respect to health, well-being, and crew performance in the cabin/cockpit environment. The investigation will provide new tools for the design of a better and safer workplace in aeronautics, and will foster the definition of metrics and guidelines for a general improvement of the environment inside aircraft.

Scientific and Technical Work-plan; Main Project Output

The HEACE project is structured in work packages, as follows:

• The effects of the environment on health and comfort will be reviewed, end-users' requirements and environmental characteristics identified, and the constraints for the test-settings defined. This information will determine the experimental settings.
• Definition and evaluation of all environmental and health-related input and output data and decision on in-flight and mock-up test procedures.
• The main test section for acquiring experimental data in mock-ups and in-flight, including all loops of pre-tests, mock-up tests, test-setting modifications and improvements, and in-flight tests.
• The data are evaluated in order to develop a Human Response Model.
• Development of evaluation- and design-tools, and of recommendations with respect to future guidelines. This work-package provides as the main output of the HEACE project:
  • methodological approaches to obtain comfort and health,
  • software for evaluation and design of cabin environments for European manufacturers,
  • recommendations for standards and guidelines with respect to these parameters.

HEACE aims at a close cooperation with the RTD project CabinAir and the technology platform FACE, with respect to measurement and evaluation. Joint meetings with information exchange on environmental comfort aspects with regard to passengers are foreseen.

Economic Development Perspectives

Between the years 2000 and 2010, a potential world market of 8000 commercial aircraft is predicted. The European aircraft industry intends to build about the 40% of these aircraft. Therefore, the cost of not being competitive compared to non-European counterparts would be very high in terms of loss of market share. One important acknowledged sales argument is the health, safety and performance of the crew, which is directly related to their general comfort and well-being. By meeting the needs of the crew, the passengers will also benefit.

The targeted design and assessment tools for comfort, health and well-being will be usable during an early stage of the design process, thus contributing to reduced design times and costs, and to the manufacture of better quality aircraft.

Competitive products with the enhanced comfort of a well-tuned aircraft's interior environment will lead to increased market share, which is a direct benefit to European industry. The spin-off of increased sales will also help other European industrial sectors (e.g. equipment and suppliers) to improve their sales and qualify their products with the challenge of advanced technology.

Contribution to European Technological Progress

Comfort in transport, and particularly in aircraft and the automotive sector, has already been dealt with by referring to noise, and sometimes vibration. HEACE will improve understanding of the multidimensional impact of all relevant environmental parameters on the well-being and subjective perception of comfort and the performance of the crew and passengers. Relevant parameters would include noise and vibration, temperature, airflow, humidity, air pollutants, lighting, etc. This will lead to advanced assessment tools that will definitely improve the "Environment Friendliness" by realisation of a "Friendly Aircraft Cabin Environment" (cited from KA 4). The methodology developed will also be subsequently applicable to the whole transportation industry.