No abstract

A personal microclimate management system is designed to maintain thermal comfort which allows people to overcome a harsh environment. It consists of several micro-fans placed in the garment side seam to provide cooling air. The computational fluid dynamics method was used to simulate the three-dimensional model and analysis the influence of fan’s number and air gap distance. The obtained results depict that the introduced cool airflow will find its way along paths with flow resistance minimized and exhaust through several separated exit. The body heat flux is taken away at the same time. The convection effect is enhanced by the increase in the fans’ numbers, but the fans’ cooling effect varies a lot because of various air gap distances. When the air gap is small enough, the cooling air impact the body surface directly and causes fierce heat loss. While the air gap distance is large enough, the heat transfer along the skin surface could be enhanced by the eddy flow which is existed in the air gap between body and garment. These phenomena can maintain the body’s thermal comfort in a suitable range.

In the process of bra cup customization, the matching between bra cup surface and breast shape largely depends on the practical experience of designers. To achieve effective customization, this study proposes an inverse design method. This method prescribes the surface of the main test section and subsequently optimizes the corresponding shape of the bra cup, thus minimizing the supremum of pressure in the target region. The optimization framework is mainly based on the particle swarm optimization algorithm and Kriging surrogate model. The inner surface of the bra cup represents the study model, and the three-dimensional morphology of the bra cup is characterized by the free-form deformation. The result exhibits a reduction of 22.51% in the pressure of the design cup as compared to the body size cup. The developed method can contribute to the engineering and personalized customization of the bra cup, thus further improving the fitting of the bra cup.