Development of an ‘artificial human’ for clothing research

The clothing is the closest envelope of the human body, and hence, has the primary im-pact on thermal comfort, physiological response of the human body and environmental strain. On the other hand, the clothing microenvironment is affected by physiological reactions (sweating, temperature distribution, body movement). Nowadays, thermal sweating manikins used to study the interactions of the body-clothing-environment system are unable to simulate adequately the spatial and transient thermal behaviour of the human body. Ideally, a human simulator should ‘feel’ and re-spond dynamically to the thermal environment as real humans do. In this work thermal sweating devices were coupled with the iesd-Fiala multi-node model of human physiology and thermal comfort. The coupling procedure was first de-veloped for the iesd-Fiala model and a single-sector cylinder Torso. A new single-sector thermophysiological human simulator reproduced adequately the overall physiological response of the average human, which was proved by comparison with results of human subject tests for a wide range of environmental conditions. In the next step, the elaborated coupling method was applied to the multi-sector, ana-tomically-shaped thermal sweating manikin SAM. The multi-sector thermophysiologi-cal human simulator with homogenous surface temperature distribution reproduced the thermal behaviour observed in human subject tests with good accuracy. However, an attempt to advance this human simulator to one with a heterogeneously distributed sur-face temperature was unsuccessful, as the results predicted by the simulator differed greatly from those obtained from human subject tests. The single-sector physiological simulator has been shown to perform well in the valida-tion tests with use of clothing ensembles. Time saving testing, repeatability of the measurement of the physiological response of an average individual and the ability of testing in conditions unsafe for humans are major advantages of this human simulator.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Psikuta, Agnieszka

• thermal manikin
• physiological model
• thermophysiological human simulator

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/04f64ea0-ddf7-404a-85d2-ddbe418c4514/download