Prediction of the Physiological Response of Humans Wearing Protective Clothing Using a Thermophysiological Human Simulator

Abstract

Most standards and devices for determining clothing properties ignore the physiological state of the wearer and are inadequate to evaluate the transient thermal properties of clothing ensembles. This study evaluated the physiological burden of different types of protective clothing and environmental conditions using the recently developed single-sector thermo-physiological human simulator and compared its performance with a thermal cylinder (without the physiological control model) and with an advanced physiological model (with a simple clothing model). A single-sector physiological simulator developed to simulate the dynamic thermal and perceptual behavior of humans over a wide range of environmental and personal conditions was successfully validated in this study through tests with clothed individuals exposed to hot and cold conditions. In comparative tests on water vapor permeable and impermeable clothing samples, the simulator provided a much more complete picture of actual clothing performance, for example, in terms of moisture retention within the clothing and the additional cooling due to the “heat pipe” effect in impermeable clothing.

Keywords:

• clothing measurement
• human simulator
• physiological manikin

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research (SBF/SER) for funding a part of this work as part of COST action 730 under project C06.0023. Our thanks go to Dr. Mark Richards and Dr. Dusan Fiala for their scientific and editorial support in an early stage of this study; Hannu Rintamäki and Tero Mäkinen from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Oulu; Anna Marszałek from the Central Institute of Labour Protection in Warsaw; and Martin Camenzind from the Laboratory of Protection and Physiology at Empa for their efforts to make the data and the clothing accessible for this work.