2005 Volume 30 Issue 99 Pages 31-41
The purposes of this paper are to determine the influence of floor cooling upon the human body and to propose optimum thermal comfort zone in floor cooling conditions based on the experimental data. Experiments were conducted under the following conditions in a cooled floor room. There were eight combinations of floor surface and air temperature. Air temperature was set to three cases (t_a=25℃, 27℃, 29℃). Floor temperature was set three cases (t_f=t_a, t_a-1℃, t_a-2℃). Relative humidity and air velocity were kept constant level of 60% and less than 0.2m/s. There were six Japanese young female. The following results were obtained. Operative temperature corrected by conduction that describes the combined effects of thermal radiation and thermal conduction was successfully applied to the evaluation of the influence of thermal conditions upon the human body. The thermal neutral vote was associated with operative temperature corrected by conduction of 27.3℃ and with mean skin temperature corrected by conduction of 34.0℃. The maximum point of subjective thermal comfort vote appeared where thermal sensation vote stood at the warmer side of the neutral. The optimum thermal comfort zone for leg-out sitting positioned Japanese in floor cooling conditions was represented with the operative temperature corrected by conduction of 25.3 to 30.5℃
