thermal sensation

Due to age-related physiological changes, older people are more vulnerable than young people to heat or cold conditions. Predicting older people's thermal sensations is essential for controlling the built environment and avoiding extreme heat/cold injuries. Previous studies mainly focused on predicting the thermal sensation of young people, and the data-driven methods are often not constrained by physiological responses. This study proposes a new integrated model to combine the two-node physiological model and the data-driven method random forest classifier.

Thermal comfort and sensation are important aspects of the building design and indoor climate control as modern man spends most of the day indoors. Conventional indoor climate design and control approaches are based on static thermal comfort/sensation models that views the building occupants as passive recipients of their thermal environment. Assuming that people have relatively constant range of biological comfort requirements, and that the indoor environmental variables should be controlled to conform to that constant range.

Conventional Displacement Ventilation (DV) system has been installed in an office of a Zero Energy Building (ZEB). Enhanced DV (EDV) system, consisting of fans mounted to the chair, which has been demonstrated in laboratory and field environmental chamber studies earlier was implemented for the first time in a full-scale office environment to assess its effectiveness of improving the thermal sensation of the occupants. Objective measurements and subjective assessments were conducted in the office with 12 occupants over a period of 2 weeks.

Thermal comfort, determined by the influence of the indoor environmental parameters on thermal sensation, is regarded as an important indicator of human wellbeing and health. Neurophysiological mechanisms are responsible for thermal sensation. Models of thermal sensation could be very useful in design of new high performance buildings. Humans do not sense temperature directly. Temperature information is coded into the firing rate of temperature sensitive neurons (thermoreceptors). Human skin contains two types of thermoreceptors “cold” or “warm” sensitive.

The indoor climate is an important factor with respect to human health and comfort since we spend most of our time, no matter if awake or asleep, in the built environment. Building occupants influence their thermal environments to maximize thermal comfort by inducing thermoregulatory behaviour. In the last decades, overheating of cities and buildings became an important issue. However, the effect of a mild hot environment on human thermoregulatory behaviour remains unclear.  To study the effects of a mild warm environment we propose a mild warm acclimation study.

Providing cooling effect with low energy consumption makes the exploration of air flow utilization significative. In ASHRAE Standard 55-2010, the cooling effects of elevated air movement are evaluated using the SET index as computed by the Gagge 2-Node model of whole-body heat balance. Air movement in reality has many forms, which might create heat flows and thermal sensations that cannot be accurately predicted by a simple whole-body model, and the affected body surface might be variably nude (e.g. face) or clothed.

This paper presents the results from the thermal comfort studies at three airport terminal buildings in the UK where seasonal on-site surveys were conducted. The investigation involved extensive monitoring of the indoor environmental conditions along with 3,087 questionnaire-guided interviews with terminal users. The paper quantifies the thermal requirements of the terminal population and focuses on the thermal perception of passengers and staff in different terminal spaces.

A large number of indices have been developed to assess human bioclimatic conditions. The indices that could be considered valid in all climate and seasons are those that are based on calculations involving the heat balance equation. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the performance of selected existing indices based on body’s energy balance, in an outdoor built environment. A field questionnaire survey was carried out simultaneously with microclimatic measurements in a street canyon located in the centre of Athens, Greece.

The temperature of human skin is determined by the human thermoregulatory system which reacts to changes in the thermal balance between a human body and the environment. For this reason, skin temperature can be used as the quickest predictor for the assessment of local comfort or discomfort. This paper presents the outcome of case study experiments carried out to determine which of the skin temperature measurement points (specified in accordance with the ISO 9886 standard) can be used to determine local and general thermal comfort.

This study reports the findings from subjective responses of tropically-acclimatized people and theirrelationships with cutaneous indicators at three air temperatures, i.e. 20.0, 23.0, and 26.0C. A blindintervention study was conducted in a simulated office environment. Ninety-six subjects were recruitedand divided into 6 groups of 16 subjects. Each group was asked to perform simulated office tasks in theroom for a continuous four-hour session. The subjects also completed surveys on general thermalcomfort and sensations at various body locations.