Improving local ventilation prediction by accounting for inter-segmental ventilation

Abstract

The inter-segmental ventilation rate at clothing inter-connection of arms and trunk affects the estimation of local ventilation rates of these clothed segments. The accurate estimation of the inter-segmental ventilation rate is based on the integration of a connected clothed cylinders model with a bio-heat model to predict a realistic segmental skin temperature. This integration is validated with experiments on a thermal manikin using the tracer gas method. The results show that accounting for the inter-segmental ventilation rate improves the estimation of the segmental ventilation of the arm and the trunk for different garment apertures at external wind velocities less than 4 m/s. For a wind velocity of 1 m/s, the inter-connection increased the trunk ventilation by up to 12% and heat loss by up to 5.46%. A statistical correlation is established for the inter-segmental ventilation rate in terms of the influencing parameters: air permeability, wind velocity, mean air gap size between skin and clothing, and the upper clothing aperture design. Furthermore, a local ventilation rate correction factor equation is developed as a function of the inter-segmental ventilation rate to correct for local ventilation rates when derived from values of isolated/unconnected clothed segments. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.