Assessment of Human Safety and Thermal Comfort in High-Temperature Environment: CFD and Human Thermoregulation Model

Abstract

The safety and the thermal comfort of victims and firefighters are important in the building fires, which are a little dependent on the occupant fatalities. In order to investigate the effects of the dangerous environment on human body in fires, numerical calculation of the heat transfer and human thermoregulation are presented in this paper. The numerical manikins coupled with human thermal models were proved as powerful tools for visualizing thermal comfort. The two‐node model by Gagge and multi‐code thermoregulation models were investigated, and the Gagge’s model was coupled with the CFD for high‐temperature environment simulation, with which a numerical manikin was built. During the simulation, temperatures of skin and core compartment of Computer Simulated Person (CPS) were recorded respectively, and the Predicted Mean Vote index values were counted. The thermal load on skin is much higher than neutral cases and the skin can be burnt in minutes if no protection and heat abstraction methods were introduced. Though existing models can predict thermal comfort in general indoor environment, they are not suitable in predicting the thermal comfort with high‐temperature cases. It was suggested that more research combining CFD coupling thermoregulation models with thermal manikin experiment are needed.