Impact of cold indoor thermal environmental conditions on human thermal response

Abstract

To explore the thermal responses under the non-thermal equilibrium cold environmental conditions, a laboratory study was conducted in climate chamber. The local skin temperatures and thermal sensation of 20 subjects were recorded at 10 min intervals for 90 min under air temperatures of 7.4, 9.1, 11 and 15 °C. The results show that both local skin temperatures and mean skin temperature decrease not only with the drop of ambient air temperature but also with the exposure time. Local thermal sensation and overall the thermal sensation have the similar temperature-varying and time-varying characteristics. Predicted mean vote (PMV) model cannot correctly predict the thermal sensation under non-thermal equilibrium cold environment. The correlation between local thermal sensation and local skin temperatures shows that thermal sensation is closely related to skin temperature. Skin temperature is an effective indicator of thermal sensation. A linear relationship model between overall thermal sensation and mean skin temperature, considering both ambient temperature and exposure time, was established in the non-thermal equilibrium cold environment, which makes the evaluation of thermal sensation more objective.