Role of Clothing Insulation for Thermal Comfort: A Numerical Study using Bio-Heat Transfer Model

Abstract

Clothing plays a major role in protecting the human body from cold and hot environment by working as an insulator. The physical factors such as conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation and the physiological factors such as blood flow and metabolism within the body together with clothing system help to maintain human thermal comfort and the human thermoregulatory system. On the other hand, body is continuously losing a small amount of heat from the air gap between skin surface and protective clothes. This paper studies the role and effect of the insulations of clothes and air for dry heat loss and the moisture transfer due to air velocity along with walking speed and observes how they work together for temperature distribution in human body. Pennes’ bioheat equation is taken as a model and Backward in Time and Central in Space (BTCS) scheme is used for obtaining the solution of the model. Clothing parameters, wind speed and walking speed have been added in the boundary condition in Pennes’s model among them the clothing insulation helps prevent the heat loss whereas air velocity escalate heat loss from the body. The numerical results are implemented in Python.