Comfort Climate Evaluation with Thermal Manikin Methods and Computer Simulation Models

Sammanfattning: Increasing concern about energy consumption and thesimultaneous need for an acceptable thermal environment makesit necessary to estimate in advance what effect differentthermal factors will have on the occupants. Temperaturemeasurements alone do not account for all climate effects onthe human body and especially not for local effects ofconvection and radiation. People as well as thermal manikinscan detect heat loss changes on local body parts. This factmakes it appropriate to develop measurement methods andcomputer models with the corresponding working principles andlevels of resolution. One purpose of this thesis is to linktogether results from these various investigation techniqueswith the aim of assessing different effects of the thermalclimate on people. The results can be used to facilitatedetailed evaluations of thermal influences both in indoorenvironments in buildings and in different types ofvehicles.This thesis presents a comprehensive and detaileddescription of the theories and methods behind full-scalemeasurements with thermal manikins. This is done with new,extended definitions of the concept of equivalent temperature,and new theories describing equivalent temperature as avector-valued function. One specific advantage is that thelocally measured or simulated results are presented with newlydeveloped "comfort zone diagrams". These diagrams provide newways of taking into consideration both seat zone qualities aswell as the influence of different clothing types on theclimate assessment with "clothing-independent" comfort zonediagrams.Today, different types of computer programs such as CAD(Computer Aided Design) and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics)are used for product development, simulation and testing of,for instance, HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning)systems, particularly in the building and vehicle industry.Three different climate evaluation methods are used andcompared in this thesis: human subjective measurements, manikinmeasurements and computer modelling. A detailed description ispresented of how developed simulation methods can be used toevaluate the influence of thermal climate in existing andplanned environments. In different climate situationssubjective human experiences are compared to heat lossmeasurements and simulations with thermal manikins. Thecalculation relationships developed in this research agree wellwith full-scale measurements and subject experiments indifferent thermal environments. The use of temperature and flowfield data from CFD calculations as input produces acceptableresults, especially in relatively homogeneous environments. Inmore heterogeneous environments the deviations are slightlylarger. Possible reasons for this are presented along withsuggestions for continued research, new relationships andcomputer codes.Key-words:equivalent temperature, subject, thermalmanikin, mannequin, thermal climate assessment, heat loss,office environment, cabin climate, ventilated seat, computermodel, CFD, clothing-independent, comfort zone diagram.