Personal factors in thermal comfort assessment: clothing properties and metabolic heat production

In the assessment of thermal comfort in buildings, the use of the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model is very popular. For this model, data on the climate, on clothing and on metabolic heat production are required. This paper discusses the representation and measurement of clothing parameters and metabolic rate in the PMV context. Several problems are identified and for some of these solutions are provided. For clothing insulation it was shown that effects of body motion and air movement are so big that they must be accounted for in comfort prediction models to be physically accurate. However, effects on dry heat exchange are small for stationary, light work at low air movement. Also algorithms for convective heat exchange in prediction models should be reconsidered. For evaporative heat resistance of the clothing worn, which is currently not an input factor in the PMV model, it was shown that in cases where special clothing with high vapour resistance is worn (e.g. clean-room clothing), comfort may be limited by the clothing as it will induce a high skin wettedness. Thus, for such cases clothing vapour resistance should not be neglected in the calculation of comfort using the PMV model, or the induced skin wettedness should be calculated separately. The effects on thermal comfort of reductions in vapour resistance due to air and body movements are also shown to have a substantial impact on the comfort limits in terms of skin wettedness and cannot be neglected either. For metabolic heat production it was concluded that for precise comfort assessment a precise measure of metabolic rate is needed. In order to improve metabolic rate estimation based on ISO 8996, more data and detail is needed for activities with a metabolic rate below 2 MET. Finally, it was shown that the methods for determining metabolic rate provided in ISO 8996 (typically used in comfort assessment and evaluations) do not provide sufficient accuracy to allow determination of comfort (expressed as PMV) in sufficient precision to classify buildings to within 0.3 PMV units as proposed in the upcoming revision of ISO 7730.     

空气湿度对人体热舒适的影响

讨论了在静态热环境下，空气湿度与人体热平衡、皮肤湿润度和人体对衣物的感觉以及人体热舒适之间的关系，分析了湿度瞬态变化对人体平均体表温度、热感觉和热舒适造成的影响。     

Simplified human body model for evaluating thermal radiant environment in a radiant cooled space

A simplified model of a human body for evaluating a radiant cooled space was developed. The model was constructed by combining cylindrical and rectangular parts. The geometrical validity of the model was verified by examining the effective radiation area and projection area factor of the model. Then, skin temperature and thermal resistance of clothing on the body were defined on the basis of measured values of a real subject. Finally, the model was applied to the analysis of the thermal environment in a radiant cooled space and verified to be applicable for the simulation of the thermal response of the real subject.     

A model of human physiology and comfort for assessing complex thermal environments

The Berkeley Comfort Model is based on the Stolwijk model of human thermal regulation but includes several significant improvements. Our new model allows an unlimited body segments (compared to six in the Stolwijk model). Each segment is modeled as four body layers (core, muscle, fat, and skin tissues) and a clothing layer. Physiological mechanisms such as vasodilation, vasoconstriction, sweating, and metabolic heat production are explicitly considered. Convection, conduction (such as to a car seat or other surface in contact with any part of the body) and radiation between the body and the environment are treated independently. The model is capable of predicting human physiological response to transient, non-uniform thermal environments. This paper describes the physiological algorithms as well as the implementation of the model.     

Assessing thermal comfort of active people in transitional spaces in presence of air movement

The aim of this study is to develop a modeling methodology to assess thermal comfort and sensation of active people in transitional spaces and consider how comfort can be achieved by air movement while changing upper body clothing properties. The modeling is based on a bioheat model, capable of predicting segmental skin and core temperature from locally ventilated clothed body parts. The bioheat model is integrated with thermal comfort and sensation models to predict comfort in presence of air movement.The model accuracy in predicting comfort was validated by and agreed with the results of a survey administered to subjects wearing typical clothing at different activity levels to record their overall and local thermal sensation and comfort in a transitional space at Beirut summer climate. The transitional space temperature monitored during the experiments ranged between 27 °C and 30 °C.A parametric study is performed to assess thermal comfort in transitional spaces for different air movement levels and for three clothing designs. The high permeable clothing at 1.5 m/s and indoor temperature of 30 °C improved the Predicted Mean Vote to values less than 0.5 compared to 1.01 attained with typical low permeable clothing.     

Investigation of indoor thermal comfort under transient conditions

In industrialized countries about 90% of the time is spent indoors. In indoor, thermal comfort can be basically predicted by the environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, air velocity and by the personal parameters as activity and clothing resistance. In this study, a mathematical model of thermal interaction between human body and environment was established and the effect of clothing and air velocity was examined under transient conditions. By the developed model, human body has been separated to 16 segments and possible local discomforts are taken into consideration. Using the model, changes in the sensible and latent heat losses, skin temperature and wettedness, thermal comfort indices were calculated. In a hot environment latent heat loss increases by means of sweating. Because of over wetted skin, comfort sense goes worse. Especially, at feet and pelvis skin wettedness reaches maximum level. Sensible and latent heat losses rise and the skin temperature and wettedness decrease with increasing air velocity.     

Assessment of Factors Affecting the Continuing Performance of Firefighters’ Protective Clothing: A Literature Review

There has been some research into the level of damage and changes to important properties of firefighters’ protective clothing after exposure to conditions such as elevated temperature and ultra violet radiation. However, at this time, the results are not comprehensive enough to develop a standard procedure to estimate the remaining useful life of firefighters’ protective clothing. There is also a need to develop non-destructive techniques to evaluate clothing, for most tests used to evaluate properties of clothing are destructive, and visual cues cannot completely assess the level of deterioration of the properties of thermal protective fabrics. In this paper, major factors that affect the continuing performance of firefighters’ protective clothing and their effects on the service life of the clothing are reviewed. Some non-destructive methods which have been employed in different studies to evaluate the degradation of physical properties of firefighters’ protective clothing are also described, along with statistical and probabilistic methods for estimating the useful life of materials. Suggestions for future research, which will assist fire departments in determining the level of damage to clothing, and estimating its remaining useful life are also discussed.     

Integrated thermal comfort analysis using a parametric manikin model for interactive real-time simulation

Following the work of Fiala (Fiala, D., Lomas, K., and Stohrer, M., 2001. Computer prediction of human thermoregulatory and temperature-responses to a wide range of environmental conditions. International Journal of Biometeorology, 45, 143–159) we developed and tested a parametric multi-segment manikin model as the interface between Fiala's human thermoregulation model and other computational codes for studying transient and local effects of thermal sensation and comfort perception. The model allows for motion control by transforming body parts according to an armature model which relates topological dependencies. The position of joints and decomposition into segments is chosen in terms of the settings of Fiala's model. Several faceted geometric models are available such as the NASA MSIS Standard or predefined NASTRAN geometries. The developed thermoregulation interface provides means to computational steering, i.e. to interact with an ongoing simulation. The boundary conditions, the type of clothing, or the activity level can be modified online, results are updated on a real time scale during the simulation. The visualization on the artificial skin of the manikin includes the surface/skin temperatures and the local thermal sensation votes (LTSV); likewise the predicted mean vote (PMV) and the dynamic thermal sensation (DTS) are output. The LTSV data are based on experimental data which were obtained in a test chamber involving 24 test subjects for three levels of clothing insulation and a light level of activity.     

Local thermal sensation modeling—a review on the necessity and availability of local clothing properties and local metabolic heat production

Local thermal sensation modeling gained importance due to developments in personalized and locally applied heating and cooling systems in office environments. The accuracy of these models depends on skin temperature prediction by thermophysiological models, which in turn rely on accurate environmental and personal input data. Environmental parameters are measured or prescribed, but personal factors such as clothing properties and metabolic rates have to be estimated. Data for estimating the overall values of clothing properties and metabolic rates are available in several papers and standards. However, local values are more difficult to retrieve. For local clothing, this study revealed that full and consistent data sets are not available in the published literature for typical office clothing sets. Furthermore, the values for local heat production were not verified for characteristic office activities, but were adapted empirically. Further analyses showed that variations in input parameters can lead to local skin temperature differences (?T_skin,loc = 0.4–4.4°C). These differences can affect the local sensation output, where ?T_skin,loc = 1°C is approximately one step on a 9‐point thermal sensation scale. In conclusion, future research should include a systematic study of local clothing properties and the development of feasible methods for measuring and validating local heat production.     

Productivity and physiological responses during exposure to varying air temperatures and clothing conditions

This study assessed the effects of clothing and air temperature combinations on workplace productivity and physiological response. Ten male Japanese subjects were exposed to six combinations of clothing (0.3 clo and 0.9 clo) and air temperature (16°C, 26°C, and 36°C) during which cognitive performance (Bourdon and calculation tests), manual motor performance (finger-tapping test), and physiological responses (heart rate, blood pressure, and skin and oral temperatures) were measured. Both cold exposure and lower clothing levels likely increased the Bourdon test performance. Calculation test performance tended to be affected by exposure to cold or neutral temperatures at the beginning of the test. Cold exposure undermined manual motor performance (especially when combined with fewer clothing items) while heat exposure significantly increased heart rate. Both cold exposure and higher clothing level during heat exposure increased blood pressure. Body temperature, particularly mean skin temperature, increased with higher air temperature and was significantly influenced by clothing insulation during cold exposure. These results provide novel evidence for the effects of clothing and air temperature (particularly cold) on human productivity and physiological responses in humans.     

Experimental and numerical analysis of heat transfer and airflow on an interactive building facade

The envelope of a building is mainly responsible for its energy demand. Different kinds of double skin facades (DSFs) are nowadays used as a building envelope to reduce the energy demand and improve aesthetical view of buildings. Although DSF are already extensively used, their thermal performance is not well understood. This study presents a decoupling method capable to evaluate thermal performances and analyze fluid phenomena in a DSF. The solar radiation effects were evaluated with an analytical model and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were used to evaluate complex flow and thermal effect on a commercial DSF. With the decoupling approach to account for the effects of solar radiation and flow, the numerical results obtained by the CFD approach agree well with the experimental data collected on a full scale test room with a ventilated DSF. The method can be used to establish a database to develop a tool for DSF design.     

A new simplified model for evaluating non-uniform thermal sensation caused by wearing clothing

In the standard thermal sensation models such as Fanger's and Gagge's models, the clothing system is simulated as an overall insulation covering the whole body. But under actual conditions, some segments of body are bare and other parts are covered by clothing. In addition, there is a significant difference between thermal sensation of the bare and that of covered segments. Moreover, to use a more complex multi-segmented model, large amount of empirical data is required to simulate each segment of the body. The data, then, must be numerically analyzed to determine the thermal parameters for each segment and its subdivided layers. In this study, a simplified three-node and easy-to-implement thermal sensation model is presented based on Gagge's standard model. In the present model the human body is subdivided into three lumped compartments: core, bare skin, and clothed skin. Thermoregulatory parameters of each compartment are determined by the relative energy balance equation of the compartment. The present model accurately estimates the thermal sensation of the bare as well as the clothed parts of the body. The model has been verified against the analytical and experimental results where a good agreement was found.     

低气压环境被服系统总热阻计算模型

服装热阻是影响人体热舒适的重要因素之一,夜间睡眠状态下的被服系统总热阻包括人体所穿服装热阻与整个床褥系统热阻。针对低气压环境,目前,尚缺乏被服热阻实验数据,也没有可参考的被服系统总热阻的理论计算模型。以人体睡眠状态被服系统总热阻计算方法为依据,引入气压修正项对相关参数进行修正,建立了适用于低气压环境的被服系统总热阻的修正计算模型,并用模型计算了冬夏典型被服系统总热阻,分析了气压减小对总热阻的影响,发现冬夏季被服系统总热阻均随大气压力降低而升高,增加百分比最大值均为42%,且均出现在被子覆盖率为23.3%的条件下,当海拔低于3 000m时,由被子覆盖率引起的被服系统总热阻增加系数不超过0.05。     

Evaluation of thermal comfort using combined multi-node thermoregulation (65MN) and radiation models and computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

The 65-node thermoregulation model was developed, based on the Stolwijk model. The model has 16 body segments corresponding to the thermal manikin, each consisting of four layers for core, muscle, fat and skin. The 65th node in the model is the central blood compartment, which exchanges convective heat with all other nodes via the blood flow. Convective and radiant heat transfer coefficients and clothing insulation were derived from the thermal manikin experiments. A thermoregulation model combined with radiation exchange model and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is proposed. The comprehensive simulation method is described.     

Numerical investigation of local thermal discomfort in offices with displacement ventilation

Local thermal discomfort in offices with displacement ventilation is investigated using computational fluid dynamics. The standard κ-ϵ turbulence model is used for the prediction of indoor air flow patterns, temperature and moisture distributions, taking account of heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation. The thermal comfort level and draught risk are predicted by incorporating Fanger's comfort equations in the airflow model. It has been found that for sedentary occupants with summer clothing common complaints of discomfort in offices ventilated with displacement systems result more often from an unsatisfactory thermal sensation level than from draught alone. It is shown that thermal discomfort in the displacement-ventilated offices can be avoided by optimizing the supply air velocity and temperature. It is also shown that optimal supply air conditions of a displacement system depend on the distance between the occupant and air diffuser.     

拉萨市住宅建筑冬季室内热环境测试评价

为了掌握拉萨市居住建筑室内热环境状况,本文分别对拉萨市乡村住宅建筑和城市住宅建筑室内、外空气温湿度,太阳辐射强度和室内风速进行了测试,并以问卷调查方式对冬季室内人员的活动量及衣着情况进行了调查分析.针对测试数据及调查情况,利用标准有效温度SET与不舒适性指标DISC对建筑室内热环境进行了评价分析.结果表明,拉萨地区利用...     

Personal protective clothing and safety of firefighters near a high intensity fire front

The main objective of this work is the establishment of useful guide lines for secure fighting of high intensity fires, namely the determination of the influence of the personal protective clothing properties on safety during wildland firefighting operations. The physiological reaction of men exposed to these extreme conditions is obtained by numerical simulation of the heat and the mass transfer from an individual in the proximity of a fire line, as representative of a typical situation of a firefighter suppressing a high intensity fire. It is obvious that the impinging flux density depends on flame's dimensions and its properties as well as on the distance between the flame and those involved in fire suppression activities. The results obtained were calculated using a computer program based on a modified version of the Stolwijk thermoregulation model. Taking into account the time evolutions of skin, rectal and hypothalamus temperatures, a parametric study is presented about the importance of clothing properties, activity level and other external parameters in order to avoid the risk of significant undesired thermophysiological reactions within the firefighters. The results clearly show that, besides the improvement of personal protective clothing properties, the safety of firefighters is essentially related to good control of the exposure times to these high intensity radiation fluxes.     

The pumping effect of clothing

The air layer confined between skin and fabric not only acts as insulation, but also as an active system to manage latent and dry losses. Its temperature and water content are derived for a simple model. From this model, the thermal behaviour of clothing to insure comfort for different climates is then analysed.     

Thermal comfort, skin temperature distribution, and sensible heat loss distribution in the sitting posture in various asymmetric radiant fields

This study aimed at investigating the thermal comfort for the whole body as well as for certain local areas, skin temperatures, and sensible heat losses in various asymmetric radiant fields. Human subject experiments were conducted to assess the overall comfort sensation and local discomfort, and local skin temperatures were measured. Through thermal manikin experiments, we discovered a new method for the precise measurement of the local sensible heat loss in nonuniform thermal environments. The local sensible heat losses were measured by the use of a thermal manikin that had the same local skin temperatures as the human subjects. The experimental conditions consisted of the anterior–posterior, right–left, and up–down asymmetric thermal environments created by radiation panels. A total of 35 thermal environmental conditions were created ranging from 25.5 to 30.5 °C for air temperature, from 11.5 to 44.5 °C for surface temperature of radiation panels, from 40% RH to 50% RH for humidity, and less than 0.05 m/s for inlet air velocity to the climatic chamber. The local skin temperature changed depending on the environmental thermal nonuniformity, even if the mean skin temperature remained almost the same. It is essential to use the skin temperature distribution as well as mean skin temperature for expressing thermal comfort in nonuniform environments. The local sensible heat loss changed depending on the environmental thermal nonuniformity, even if the mean sensible heat loss remained almost the same. The relationship between the local skin temperature and local sensible heat loss cannot be depicted by a simple line; instead, it varies depending on the environmental thermal nonuniformity. The local heat discomfort in the head area was dependent on both the local skin temperature and local sensible heat loss. However, the local cold discomfort in the foot area was related only to the local skin temperature.     

CFD simulation of naked flame manikin tests of fire proof garments

The overall performance of the thermal protective clothing can only be evaluated using an assessment based on an instrumented manikin under defined, close to real-life conditions in a laboratory. However, the manikin tests can only give a few of pointwise information. This paper presents a three-dimensional transient CFD simulation of heat and mass transfer in the flame manikin test of thermal protective clothing. The used grid model, simulated from Donghua Flame Manikin, have real dimensions and accurate shape of a typical Chinese man. The solver and physical models are defined in FLUENT system and the CFD simulation of a naked flame manikin test is accomplished. By means of CFD simulation, temperature and velocity fields on the manikin surface and of the whole chamber during the process of 4-second flash fire combustion are obtained, which give well predictions to the heat flux distribution in an average sense. The cumulative curve of heat fluxes in the CFD simulation is close to the curve measured by 135 sensors in the real manikin experiment. The study could be a foundation for further study on modeling heat and mass transfer in the clothed manikin experiment and predicting skin damage accurately.