Heat transfer in 3-D air gap between garment and body surface

Abstract

For the sake of investigating the heat transfer performance and its mechanism in body-air-cloth microclimate system and studying the influence of inflow air property and environment conditions, numerical calculations are carried out using computational fluid dynamics method. It is found that the body-clothing microclimate is highly influenced by the heat transfer and air gap distance between body and garment. The inflow cool air brings the convective heat flux from body surface to clothing inner surface which will result in the high temperature regions on the clothing. Moreover, the increase of air speed will accelerate this heat transfer evidently. Relatively, the decreasing of outside temperature takes into a big increasing of heat flux loss on the body and brings about high temperature gradient on the clothing surface. The findings of this study provide fundamental knowledge to improve microclimate between the body and clothing.