Analytical evaluation of thermal comfort implications from an expanded range of air temperatures and velocities

Abstract

Unique in its analytical approach to quantify thermal comfort, human exergy destruction models have been developed by researchers from different disciplines ranging from engineering, architecture to human physiology. Operating on the entropy minimization principle, a mutual hypothesis - minimized human body exergy destruction indicates neutral thermal sensation - was often used and justified. Existing researchers, however, have focused more on developing more detailed models to describe the exergy destruction instead of testing the sensitivity of the models towards different environmental or physiological parameters. To elicit more attention towards this area, we propose a series of sensitivity analysis on the different environmental parameters as inputs for the human body exergy consumption model. Comparing the resulting exergy destruction rates with existing prominent research on heterogeneity of localized thermal comfort, we aim at investigating the resulting thermal comfort under a few specific sets of indoor air conditions with constant parameters for surrounding environments.