International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Considerable researches have been conducted on human thermal comfort under steady state while studies on human thermal perception under non-steady-state is not sufficient. This paper investigates thermal perception of people who alternated between sedentary exercise and walking on a treadmill in 20oC and 25oC. Experiments in a well-controlled climate chamber, including both physiological measurements and subjective questionnaires, were conducted. The procedure of the experiments was as follows: subject sat for 30min in climate chamber to calm down before entered into stage of activity level step changing, which comprised 30min of walking at 0.9m/s followed by 30min of sitting and then walking at 1.2m/s followed by 30min of sitting. 20 subjects were involved. The results indicate that there is poor correlation between thermal sensation vote and skin temperature in activity level transient periods, and the PMV is not suitable to predict the thermal sensation of people occupying dynamic activity when their thermal sensation does not achieve to steady state. However, there is approximately linear correlation between thermal sensation vote and variation rate of temperature with time in the first few minutes after subjects stopped walking.

Index Terms—Dynamic thermal comfort, activity level, physiological response.

The authors are with the Chongqing University, Chongqing, China (e-mail: tandy017@outlook.com).

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Cite: Diyi Tan, Hong Liu, and Yuxin Wu, "The Response of Human Thermal Perception and Skin Temperature to Step-Changed Activity Level," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 425-429, 2017.