Assessment of Thermal Comfort Using Personalized Ventilation

Personal ventilation (PV) is a solution that enables a user to attain fall satisfaction from the indoor conditions. It is also a system that-if properly designed-can contribute to the energy efficiency in buildings (i.e., by supplying considerably lower amounts of fresh and treated air indoors). In order to test possible variants of local heating and cooling of a human body by the PV system, a series of tests was conducted. The tests were performed on a thermal manikin and aimed to determine which type of setting (i.e., direction of air supply and temperature of supplied air) causes required cooling/heating of the manikin's surface. The tests were performed with a thermal manikin that helped to determine an equivalent temperature (t(eq)) of the environment shaped by the PV system. The results revealed that in tests with the nude manikin the PV system decreased the t(eq) value, irrespective of the selected variant of the test. When the manikin was clothed, t(eq) would fall or rise depending on the temperature of supplied air. Tests with a nude manikin demonstrated that the cooling effect was conditioned by the velocity of air supplied from the PV system, rather than by the temperature of the supplied air. In this study, the main parameters affecting t(eq) were thermal insulation of clothing used on the manikin and velocity of around the manikin.