Development and application of a thermoregulatory control for a thermal manikin: A comparative study of the thermal response of young and elderly individuals

• A real-time thermoregulatory control for a thermal manikin was developed. • Thermal responses of young and elderly individuals were emulated with the manikin. • Body surface temperature and predicted thermal sensation were compared. • Effectiveness of local heating differed depending on the assumed occupant parameters. Thermal manikins enable a detailed, reproducible evaluation of the human body heat exchange with clothing and the surrounding environment. Conventional control of thermal manikins limits their use to steady-state conditions, but several studies have reported successful coupling of thermal manikins and human thermoregulatory models to expand their applicability to transient conditions. This study reports on the coupling of a thermal manikin with the open-source human thermoregulatory model JOS-3. The performance of the developed control was confirmed through climate chamber measurements within a temperature range corresponding to a predicted mean vote (PMV) of ± 2. Utilizing the capability of the JOS-3 model to personalize parameters such as age and body composition, a case study emulating the thermal response of young and elderly individuals was conducted. The manikin was exposed to transient conditions with and without local heating at room temperatures of 16, 19, and 21 °C. The measurement results showed that the manikin controlled with parameters of elderly individuals were more sensitive to the ambient temperatures and showed a larger decrease in body surface temperature. At 16 °C room temperature, the predicted whole-body thermal sensation based on body surface temperature showed a substantial increase with local heating only for the young individual setting. Measurements with the elderly individual setting did not yield a noticeable increase due to the lower surface temperature of body parts not targeted by the heater. The results confirmed that the developed control can assess the thermal response of different individuals in transient conditions.