Coupling CFD and human body thermoregulation model for the assessment of personalized ventilation

Personalized ventilation has great potential to improve inhaled air quality and to accommodate individual thermal preferences. In order to quantify these perceived benefits, a numerical method has been developed. In this method, a numerical thermal manikin (NTM), with the real geometry of a human body, is obtained by employing a laser scanning technique. When placed in a virtual environment, the thermal interactions with the environment are calculated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). By iteration, the calculated air velocity near the body surface is fed into a sophisticated thermoregulation model developed at the University of California, Berkeley, so that the local thermal comfort in a non-uniform environment created by personalized air (PA) is rigorously investigated. In this paper, the performances of three different PV systems are investigated, namely, the desk-edge-based PV, PV using a movable panel (MP), and chair-based PV. The results exhibit reasonable agreement with the experimental measurements. The three types of PV are all able to lower human exposure to ambient room pollutants and bring a “cool head” thermal condition favorable for thermal comfort. The present work illustrates that in the development of localized personal environmental control systems, an NTM coupled with a human-body thermal regulation model is a useful tool for visualizing thermal comfort and ventilation effectiveness.