Coupling outer-body airflow and inner-body thermoregulation models to predict thermal comfort in non-uniform environments

In this study, we developed a numerical thermal manikin (NTM) with inner-body thermoregulation functions to investigate the local and overall thermal comfort in non-uniform thermal environments. The effect of interaction between human body and his/her environment was modeled by transferring air condition data from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation into a thermoregulation model, feeding back the body surface temperatures from the inner-body model as boundary conditions to CFD, and then iterating until convergence. Application of this approach in the evaluation of two kinds of personalized ventilation systems was demonstrated. Comparison with some of the experimental results showed that it was able to predict the thermal comfort level with reasonable accuracy.