Environmental Control System (aircraft) - Health Concerns

Health Concerns

The bleed air comes from the engines but is "bled" from the engine upstream of the combustor. Air cannot flow backwards though the engine except during a compressor stall (essentially a jet engine backfire), thus the bleed air should be free of combustion contaminants from the normal running of the aircraft's own engines.

However, on occasions components (carbon seals) can leak oil (containing highly toxic additives) into the bleed air, in what is known in the industry as a "fume event". This is generally dealt with quickly since failed oil seals will reduce the engine life.

Nevertheless, oil contamination from this and other sources within the engine bay is leading to serious health concerns, and has triggered research by a number of academic institutions.


Read more about this topic:  Environmental Control System (aircraft)

Famous quotes containing the words health and/or concerns:

    ...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.
    Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)

    American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)