Analysis of newborn thermal comfort in a textile incubator

Abstract

Data published by European and World Health Organizations show that since 1990 the number of births has been steadily decreasing, which poses the risk of lack of generational replacement. According to WHO report, every year, 2.6 millions of newborns in the world die in the first month of their life. One million of them in the first 24 h so they require special care and medical supervision, so for the first days or even months of their lives they remain in incubators. The purpose of the research was to develop the construction and build a prototype of a textile incubator, whose most important function is to keep the baby warm, with the possibility of cooling it during therapeutic hypothermia. The incubator model was built in three variants of material packages, and each of them consisted of five material layers. An innovative solution is using for the external thermal insulation layer a composite connecting a knitted fabric with aerogel. The total thermal conductivity resistance for the developed material packages of the incubator was measured using a thermally insulated sweating hot plate known as the ‘skin model’. The obtained values of thermal resistance coefficient R ct are within 2.07–2.83 clo, and in case of the package with an additional insulation layer R ct = 3.68 clo. It turned out that when the infant was placed in a textile incubator without a functional heating and cooling mat its heat balance for the adopted ambient temperatures from −5 to 24 °C was negative and ranged from −0.04 up to −50.50 W. In cases of positive heat balance, especially for all ambient temperatures, which took place for the second package where ΔQ = 0.10 ÷ 6.51 W, there is a risk of overheating the baby. The analysis of the heat balance components shows that convection and radiation have the greatest impact on the total heat loss, as on average they constitute 85.6% of the heat lost by a baby in a textile incubator.