EXperimental Study on the Influence of Thermal Conditions upon the Human Physiological and Psychological Responses in an Air-Conditioned Room

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of exposure time and pattern upon the human physiological and psychological responses in a cool and air-conditioned room and to evaluate conductive heat loss between the human body and a chair or floor surface. Two male and two female subjects participated in a series of experiments as follows : EXPI : 3 hour exposure to 23 °C air temperature. EXP2 : Repetitive 30 minute exposure to 23 °C air temperature following 30 minute exposure to 27 °C air temperature. EXP3 & EXP4 : 3 hour exposure to 27 °C air temperature. In experiments (EXP1. EXP2. EXP3) subjects sat on a chair vinyl leather chair. In experiment EXP4, however, subjects sat on a cane chair to minimize conductive heat loss. The following results were obtained. 1) The influence of heat conduction between the humen body and a chair was observed as the differences of mean clothing temperature calculated from four different formulae. 2) Subjects vote "thermal neutral" at air temperature of 24 °C and mean skin temperature of 33 °C. 3) Conductive heat loss occupied about 4% to total heat loss for each subject. It may be necessary to properly estimate heat conduction in analyses of human heat exchange. 4) There is a significant difference between the experiments EXPI and EXP2 in mean skin and mean clothing temperatures. 5) Regions of the skin can be classified to central, intermediate and peripheral regions by the cluster analysis. 6) Subjects' psychological responses were measured by Semantic Differential method. It was then found that subjects preferred the consistently cool environment to thermal transients.