Impact of local clothing values on local skin temperature simulation

Current human thermophysiological models calculate skin temperatures to predict human thermal comfort. To identify local influences on overall thermal comfort, local skin temperatures should be computed with high accuracy. This necessity depends on reliable input data of local clothing properties. However, only few data sets on local clothing insulation are published, and these values can be inconsistent. This paper analyses the effect of different sets of local clothing values on simulated skin temperatures using the thermophysiological model ThermoSEM. The skin temperatures are computed for a seated (1met), average man wearing a light clothing combination (0.5clo). Four sets of local clothing values are taken from the literature. This data is used to simulate local skin temperatures for uniform operative temperatures between 18°C and 34°C. Furthermore, the comparison to measured data is included. The results show that local skin temperatures are sensitive to the local clothing properties, and deviations might be up to 4K. These findings emphasize that local clothing parameters have to be chosen carefully. Additionally, current local clothing databases scarcely reflect the wide variety of clothing ensembles worn in practice. Therefore, this study underlines the need for further measurements of local clothing properties with detailed documentation of experimental set up.