Prediction of Mean Skin Temperature in Hot Environment Considering Sweat Efficiency and Wet Clothing

Abstract

In hot environment, sweat sometimes drips down from the body without evaporating on the body surface. However, in case wearing clothing, a part of the sweat supposed to drip makes clothing wet and evaporates through wet clothing, that increases body cooling power. We introduce a rate of effective sweat increase. A series of experiments was conducted by using collage age students in a climate chamber and a value of 0.6 as the effective sweat increase rate was obtained by applying our human model for predicting mean skin temperature and sweating rate including dripping sweat. In this paper, we demonstrate that the mean skin temperatures predicted by our model agreed well with those derived from experiments.