Center for the Built Environment

A three-part series presents the development of models for predicting the local thermal sensation (Part I) and local comfort (Part II) of different parts of the human body, and also the whole-body sensation and comfort responses (Part III). The models predict these subjective responses to the environment from thermophysiological measurements or predictions (skin and core temperatures). The models apply to a range of environments: uniform and non-uniform, transient and stable. They are based on diverse results from literature and from body-part-specific human subject tests in a climate chamber. They were validated against a test of passengers in automobiles. This series is intended to present the rationale, structure, and coefficients for these models so that others can test them and develop them further as additional empirical data becomes available. The experimental methods and some measured results from the climate chamber tests have been published previously.

Part II describes a thermal comfort model with coefficients representing 19 individual local body parts. For each part, its local comfort is predicted from local and whole-body thermal sensations. These inputs are obtained from the sensation models described in Part I and III, or from measurements.