Search Results

With development of high grade and high performance vehicles, there's a growing demand for improvement of thermal comfort in the car. Such comfort is evaluated by the passenger's thermal sensations, such as “hot” or “cold”. For improvement, we need to develop an air conditioning system which can reflect the passenger's sensory feelings as a thermal sensation. In part 1, we described thermal sensation of a passenger in a car depends on not only the skin temperature, but also the rate of change of the skin temperature, and we propose a thermal sensation evaluating equation. For this paper, we used this equation to replace the thermal sensation with the skin temperature, and studied a system which reflects the thermal sensations through on air conditioning control based on the skin temperature. We also verified the advantages of the system under various thermal conditions.

The purpose of this study is to present a new method for controlling a car air conditioning system, in which the air temperature can be controlled to produce any level of occupants' thermal sensation by utilizing car occupants' skin temperatures as a controlling index. In this paper, an equation for a quantitative evaluation of car occupants' thermal sensation, in steady and non-steady states, by face skin temperature and its rate of change was developed and was confirmed by experiments in an environmental chamber to be applicable for all seasons with an accuracy of ±1 in the thermal sensation voting scale we used.