Implication of human skin temperature under high humidity to the construction workers’ by using computational thermal simulation

Abstract

Workers in construction are the most in danger to the poor health effects of heat exposure every day. A simulated lifting task based on computational thermal model of the workers in the construction is designed and utilized to study the distribution of skin temperature under two different temperatures (32°C and 25°C) and statics relative humidity at 70%. The thermal distribution and simulation for the temperature towards human/manikin body was designed by utilising ANSYS Simulation software. The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation revealed the detailed analysis of the thermal distribution around the body/manikin while conducting lifting activities. The CFD also indicated that case study (32 °C/70%) provided the significant physiological effect to the workers in the construction. The mean skin temperature in this case study is 34.7 °C. The heat index shows that when the human working in a hot climate, they had received significantly heat as high as the heat generated from their surrounding. This experiment concluded that skin temperature was influenced significantly by the tropical climate. This particular study provided potential exploration of the environment heat to the construction workers in Malaysia through the prediction of skin temperature.