Developing Human Thermal Physiological Model for Vehicles

Abstract

Thermal sensation is significantly influenced by even local skin temperatures. Especially non-uniform environment in vehicles, such as the sunlight to driver’s left forearm or an air flow from air conditioning to driver’s feet, may make drivers feel uncomfortable. However, studies of evaluating indoor vehicle thermal comfort are few, while that of indoor buildings have been actively proceeded. In this study, therefore, as the first step to evaluate thermal comfort in vehicles, human thermal physiological model was developed to predict skin temperature for each segment of human body, and was verified by two chamber experiments. This paper describes the developing processes of the model and the fitness of predicted temperature with the experiment results.