The development of a perspiring fabric manikin for the evaluation of clothing thermal comfort

This thesis reports on the development of a novel perspiring manikin for the evaluation of clothing thermal comfort. The developed manikin is the world first perspiring manikin made of mainly water and breathable fabric, and it can simulate body heat generation and perspiration. Due to the uniqueness of the manikin, a one-step measurement method was realized for the simultaneous determination of clothing thermal insulation and evaporative resistance without any assumptions as required by the previous two-step method. The measurement results from the manikin were proven to be highly reproducible and accurate.; It was also found from this study that it takes at least 12 hours for moisture accumulation within clothing to stabilize and the effective clothing thermal insulation is highly related to the amount of moisture accumulation within clothing. Based on this understanding, it is certain that the indirect determination of evaporative heat loss and the assumption of relative humidity at the skin in the previous two-step method can cause considerable errors in the measurement of thermal insulation and evaporative resistance.; The manikin was also used to investigate the effect of garment fitting. It was found that thermal insulation and moisture vapour resistance of clothing worn on a standing manikin increases generally with garment sizes when wind velocity was up to 2.0 m/s. When garment size increases from S to XXL, the increase of clothing thermal insulation or moisture vapour resistance initially increase more steeply, then levels off.; The successful development of the perspiring fabric manikin is highly significant to clothing research, industry or consumers.