Comparison of clothing thermal comfort properties measured on female and male sweating manikins

C. Sun, Jintu Fan

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. Thermal manikins simulating human body's thermal regulatory system are essential tools for understanding the heat exchange between human body and the environment and also for evaluating the thermal comfort of clothing and near environment. However, most existing thermal manikins adopt a male's body shape and no sweating female thermal manikin has been reported so far. Furthermore, it is unclear how body shape (viz. male vs female) affects the heat loss and perspiration from the body. We report on a novel female sweating thermal manikin "Wenda". Thermal properties of the nude body and clothing ensembles measured on "Wenda" are compared with those measured on the male manikin "Walter". It was found that, although the more curvaceous female body reduces the thermal insulation of the nude manikin, it increases the apparent evaporative resistance at the same time. This may be due to the fact that the more curvaceous female body increases the surface still air layer to add resistance to heat loss by conduction and evaporative water loss by diffusion, and significantly increases the percentage of effective radiative area and the resultant radiative heat loss per unit surface area. It was further shown that clothing thermal insulation and apparent evaporative resistance measured on Wenda are typically 0 ? 11% higher than those measured on the male sweating fabric manikin-Walter, probably due to the greater clothing microclimate volume on the female manikin resulting from the looser fitting of the garments on the smaller female body and the more curvaceous surface of the female body.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2214-2223
Number of pages10
JournalTextile Research Journal
Volume87
Issue number18
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2017

Keywords

  • apparent evaporative resistance
  • clothing area factor
  • clothing thermal properties
  • female sweating thermal manikin
  • thermal insulation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Chemical Engineering (miscellaneous)
  • Polymers and Plastics

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