Abstract
Recent air-conditioning systems aim to provide thermal comfort for an unspecified number of residents. However, office workers may perceive the feeling of comfort differently depending on their clothing, metabolic rate, and personal activity level. This may cause difficulties in maintaining an optimal thermal environment. To address this problem, personal air-conditioning has attracted attention, which is highly versatile and can reduce thermal discomfort and provide comfort to all office workers by enabling individual thermal control. Therefore, the authors focused on developing an office chair, the “Cool Chair”, as a chair-type personal air-conditioning system with a cooling function from 2003 to 2016. The authors then added a warming function for year-round operation, creating the “Cool Chair with Warming Function” in 2017. Subjective evaluation results are reported. These experiments using the new chair indicated that the warming function achieves steady state in 30 minutes and the equivalent temperature of the entire body increases by +2°C. In subject experiments, the warming and cooling functions were adjusted according to individual preferences, and the cooling function was used even during winter by some individuals. The authors also confirmed that the feeling of comfort by the subjects improved at both 19°C and 22°C.
Highlights
1.1 BackgroundRecently, air-conditioning systems, which have uniform temporal and spatial variations for environments, have caught attention
It was confirmed that “Comfort” changed to “Pleasantness”. These results indicate that the Cool Chair 2017 can change “Comfort” to “Pleasantness” under the two temperature conditions
In a physical performance with thermal manikin, the heating effect of the Cool Chair 2017 has a large influence on the back side to the back thigh and increases the equivalent temperature by + 2.0 °C in the whole body
Summary
Air-conditioning systems, which have uniform temporal and spatial variations for environments, have caught attention. It is thought that the thermal comfort of office workers is improved because these systems can control planar temperature with less cold draft. Evaluation of thermal comfort based on conventional indexes involves considering a single person in a room as a representative of a group of people with common characteristics. Even if the indoor thermal environment is categorized as comfortable, workers who are sensitive to cold or heat will presumably complain of discomfort. As a solution to this problem, personal air-conditioning systems have been attracting significant attention as a means of improving the thermal comfort of office workers. With a personal air-conditioning system, each worker can adjust the thermal environment to his or her desired preference
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