The model development and case study for transient thermal response of the human body interacting with the coupled fabric-environment system

Abstract

A one-dimensional transient thermal response model for the human body subjected to the influence of coupled fabric-environment system was developed in this study. To account for the human body's thermophysiological response, the bio-heat equation was used to predict the temperature distribution within each body tissue. The fabric composed of multiple pores full of wet air was treated as the porous media. The movement, heat transfer, fiber absorption, and evaporation of sweat within the porous media were considered in the developed model and it was solved by the CFD package software-ANSYS FLUENT to simulate the transient behavior of heat and moisture transfer in the coupled human body and fabric-environment system. Two typical settings of human activities, including human acclimatization without sweating and human activity with sweating, were considered in the numerical study. To investigate the effect of ambient temperature on the transient response of the body's skin temperature, we explored three different ambient temperatures. The numerical results showed that sweating caused skin temperature to drop gradually and that the magnitude to which the skin temperature changed was nearly insensitive to the change of environmental temperatures. Moreover, the sweating rate increased with the increase of ambient temperature. Keywords: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Fabric-environment system, Heat and moisture transfer, Human body, Human thermophysiological response, Porous media