Effect Of Local Exposure On Human Responses

With the energy consumption problem by using conventional air conditioning, as a new mode, local exposure attained more and more attentions. As a phenomenon local exposure exists widely, and the transfer of the research direction from whole body exposure to local exposure not only has strong application background, but also helps to discover the essence of human responses. Through subjective experiments, exploration of human responses to single body part exposure was performed.At the room temperatures ranging from 28 to 35°C, three sensitive body parts: face, chest and back were each exposed to local cooling air, which temperatures were 22, 25 and 28°C, while the air velocity was kept constant at 1m/s. Dressed in shorts, 30 randomly selected male subjects were exposed to each condition for 30 minutes. During the exposure, they reported their local thermal sensations of each body part, overall thermal sensation, overall thermal acceptability and overall thermal comfort on voting scales at regular intervals.It was shown that local exposure affected the local thermal sensations of the unexposed body parts significantly, based on which a new influencing factor method was proposed. The influencing factor and weight for the cooling body part were constant and unaffected by room and local cooling air temperatures. Influencing factor represents the extrinsic effect of local exposure on overall thermal sensation, and influencing weight is the intrinsic reason for the effect, and they are connected by the correlations between local thermal sensations of body parts. Based on influencing factor and weight, predictive models of overall thermal sensation were obtained. Thermoregulatory reaction was the possible physiological mechanism of thermal sensation to local exposure.Taking the maximum thermal sensation difference between body parts to present nonuniformity of thermal sensation, a new assessment model of non-uniform environment was proposed. It was shown by using the model that the influencing factor on overall thermal sensation and the influencing factor on the maximum thermal sensation difference between body parts determined the effect of local...