Quantitative Measurement of Thermal Comfort Under Transient and Non-Uniform Conditions in Vehicles 2003-01-2232

A unique measurement device, called StickMan, and a customized vehicle climate control system, were developed to measure thermal comfort under transient and non-uniform conditions inside vehicle. The systems were fully calibrated and then used to characterize the vehicle thermal environments (air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity, relative humidity) at 20 locations. Coupled with a seventeen segment version of the human thermal model TRANMOD (Jones and Ogawa, 1992), one can predict both whole body and local thermal sensation accurately based on the StickMan measurements. Therefore, using a device such as StickMan may reduce the design cycle and costs by eliminating the need of large number of human subjects to evaluate thermal comfort satisfaction in vehicle prototypes.