Young Male Upper-body Sweat Mapping

With increasing interests in outdoor activities and more need of working in extreme conditions,it is becoming more and more important to keep thermal-wet comfort for clothes and balance body heat.Because research on apparel comfort usually mainly focus on the heat and humid interaction between human and clothing or the environment,human body turns out to be the basic and key point for apparel comfort research.Furthermore,as sweating has a close connection with the moist heat transfer of clothing,research on human sweating is surely very important for improving apparel comfort research.So far,limited sweat research can be found in apparel field,because most sweat research is from other field like medical science,kinesiology,occupational protection and so on.And the key point for these fields and apparel is different,because apparel industry need more quantitively comprehensive research while the other fields focus more on sweat mechanism.Although regional sweat rate variations in humans have already been widely recognized in a lot of research,most studies only measured a few sites using a limited surface area,and then generalize the result to larger regions.As a result,this study used a modified absorbent method of sweat collection to quantitively investigate the upper body sweat distribution of Chinese untrained young females from different regions of origin.In addition,correlations between some important physical characteristics tested in this study and sweat rates were analyzed as well.The experiments of this study were finished in a climatic chamber with a moderate environmental conditions?25 ?,50%rh?and a 2 m.s^-1 air velocity.Participants were required to walking in a treadmill with two exercise intensities separately,and their sweat of upper body was collected at the final five minutes of each intensity.We recruited the participants from three regions of origin in China,including North China?Heilongjiang,Jilin,Liaoning,Beijing?,South China?Yunnan,Guangxi,Guangdong?,and Shanghai region?Shanghai,Jiangsu,Anhui,Zhejiang?.The results showed that:?1?Both the gross sweat losses and regional sweat rates in three regions all increased significantly from the lower intensity to the higher intensity;?2?In both intensities,the South group showed the lowest gross sweat loss and regional sweat rates,while the North and Shanghai group are similar;?3?In both intensities,all the three groups showed higher sweat rates in the torso than the extremities,and higher in the posterior than the anterior,while the sweat rates on the torso decreased from the medial to the lateral;?4?No significant correlations were found between BF%,VO_2,max,Vital capacity by body weight,Tcore and gross sweat loss in both intensities,while the vital capacity only correlates significantly with gross sweat loss in the higher intensity;?5?In the lower intensity there's a few significant correlations between regional skin temperatures and regional sweat rates,but little significant correlation was found in the higher intensity.Above all,this study is the first to provide a detailed sweat rate data for all the regions of upper body in China,so it will be very helpful for the functional design of sportswear and protection clothes.Meanwhile,as this research is also the first to study the differences of sweat distributions between different regions of origin in China,it will help reveal the geographical influences to some extent.