Innovative thermal manikin for assessing local thermal comfort - development of a new hardware architecture

This paper explores the utilization of advanced thermal manikins, a pioneering tool in assessing thermal comfort in various settings, including vehicles and buildings. These manikins effectively mimic the human body’s thermoregulatory processes, yielding precise data on heat exchange and moisture movement. The core objective is to enhance occupants’ thermal comfort, directly influencing their well-being and productivity. The discussed thermal manikin, featuring 71 superficial zones, is adept at measuring local thermal comfort through equivalent temperature, a comprehensive indicator considering both convective and radiative heat exchanges between the body and its surroundings. Utilizing LabVIEW software, the manikin quantifies total heat flux across different zones, each with a unique surface temperature. The primary measurements are power consumption or heat loss and surface temperature. When normalized to an interior climate, this data translates into an equivalent temperature. The manikin’s local segment equivalent temperature acts as a local thermal comfort gauge. The benefits of thermal manikins in thermal comfort assessment include their capacity for localized evaluation and the prediction of local sensations using equivalent temperature or a localized PMV based on this temperature instead of air or operative temperatures.