Measurements of the additional thermal insulation of aircraft seat with clothing ensembles of different seasons

Abstract

Clothing insulation is one of the important factors of human thermal comfort assessment. As a special type of clothing, the insulation of seat would affect the thermal comfort of human body. In this paper, a thermal manikin named Newton that has 20 body parts, and a real three-seat chair disassembled from aircraft cabin were used for the test. The experiment was conducted in an artificial climate chamber. The air temperature was 21 °C, the relative humidity was 50% and the wind speed was below 0.2 m/s. The thermal manikin was controlled at constant surface temperature (CST) mode and the skin temperature was 35 °C. The manikin was tested in wooden seat and aircraft seat respectively so that the additional insulation of the aircraft seat can be calculated. There were five types of clothing ensembles: nude, summer clothing, spring (autumn) clothing, winter clothing and winter clothing without coat. The results showed that the additional insulation of summer clothing was the lowest while that of winter clothing was the highest. It ranged from 0.15 to 0.35clo in different conditions. The results were also compared with ISO standard and ASHRAE standard and the additional insulation of aircraft seat was higher than most of the common seats. Its influence on the neutral temperature calculated by PMV was also greater in winter than in summer.