Assessment of local and overall vehicular thermal human comfort and sensation states for transient, non- uniform conditions under variant air velocity levels

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of any vehicular climatic control in terms of heating and air conditioning (AC) systems is to achieve maximum thermal human comfort with energy efficient. Therefore, it is important to analyse the temperature distribution and air-flow field in the cabin compartment to achieve the highest and rapid human comfort. This paper adopted a Berkeley human comfort model to show the behaviour of a vehicular human sensation and comfort at different airflow velocity levels. A temporal history, local sensation (LS), and comfort (LC) were analysed for different body segments with the addition of the overall sensation (OS) and the overall comfort (OC) inside the passenger compartment under summer period weather conditions. This study revealed that: because of the air velocity plays crucial impacts on both convection and evaporation mechanisms which directly effects on the heat losses from the body and thermal human comfort, the controlling of air movement with the temperature helps the environmental cabin to achieve the comfort zone faster than the sole control of the temperature only. When activated the air conditioning systems, the vehicular environmental parameters will change dramatically and a rapid transient occurred especially in the first few minutes.

KEYWORDS:

• Thermal sensation
• thermal comfort
• vehicular
• temperature distribution
• air velocity
• Berkeley comfort model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Alahmer

Dr. Alahmer, Associate Prof. in alternative energy technology department, faculty of engineering, Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan (ZU), Jordan, 2019 as sabbatical leave. Alahmer is an associate professor in the mechanical engineering department, Tafila technical university, 2018. Alahmer received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University, SC, USA in 2011. He joined the ME department at the Tafila Technical University (TTU), Jordan, in 2012 as Assistant Professor. His research concerns human comfort, renewable energy, Alternative fuel, and air conditioning system. Alahmer got an Australian Endeavour scholarship and fellowship, August 15, 2015, to January 31, 2016, at the school of engineering and ICT, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia as a visiting researcher professor. Moreover, he got a (DFG) scholarship, June 1, 2017, to August 31, 2017, at Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe - University of Applied Science, Höxter, Germany. The student team of Dr. Alahmer got the award of the best second design for participating in the Formula Student Class II-2018 competition, 11-14 July, UK among 36 international universities.  Dr. Alahmer had several publications in more than 40 articles in privileged journals and conferences. Furthermore, he published a book and a chapter.