Personal cooling with phase change materials to improve thermal comfort from a heat wave perspective

Abstract

Wearable personal cooling integrated with phase change materials has the advantage of cooling human body's micro-environment in contrast to stationary personalized cooling and entire room or building cooling, thus providing greater mobility and helping to save energy. In places where air conditioning is not usually used, this personal cooling method can be used as a preventive measure when confronted with heat waves for office workers, vulnerable populations such as the elderly and disabled people, people with chronic diseases, and for use at home.

Opportunities and constraints of presently used thermal manikins for thermo-physiological simulation of the human body

“…Presently, manikins are usually operated at uniform steady-state surface temperatures and homogenous sweat rates in comparative measurements, for example according to standards, such as ASTM (Gao et al 2012;Keiser et al 2008), or non-uniform surface temperatures over the body, such as cooler hands and feet (McCullough 2002;McCullough et al 1985), or uniform surface temperature change over time (Tanabe et al 1994). These attempts indicate the growing interest in using manikins to adequately simulate the effect of clothing and environmental exposures on human thermal responses such as body core temperature and skin temperature distribution, onset of vasomotor reactions, sweating and shivering.…”

Effects of Heat Stress on Working Populations when Facing Climate Change

“…PCMs has the advantage of cooling the human body's micro-environment in contrast to stationary personalized or building cooling, thus providing greater mobility and saving energy 80) . Selection of the optimum active clothing system will depend upon the requirements of the task and consideration should be given to work organization and design.…”

“…Active cooling systems are widely available such as liquid cooling and air cooling garments 28) . Active cooling systems include external connections to air or liquid supplies such as ventilated cooled air and circulated liquid cooling 80) . A practical solution is that of increasing ventilation in clothing by using air permeable clothes that are designed to increase possibilities for ventilation or by using fans for active ventilation.…”

Sustainability Challenges from Climate Change and Air Conditioning Use in Urban Areas

“…Building Insulation Personal cooling systems: phase-change material cooling vests [35],ventilated clothing, liquid and air cooling garments [8] Applying green roofs is a very good mitigation strategy for the urban heat island and roofs constitute about 20%-25% of the urban surface. Green roofs have also been shown to provide thermal insulation to buildings [11].…”