Coupling CFD and Human Body Thermoregulation Model for the Assessment of Personalized Ventilation

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Abstract
Personalized ventilation has great potential to improve inhaled air quality and to accommodate individual thermal preferences. In order to quantify these perceived benefits, a numerical method has been developed. In this method, a numerical thermal manikin (NTM), with the real geometry of a human body, is obtained by employing a laser scanning technique. When placed in a virtual environment, the thermal interactions with the environment are calculated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). By iteration, the calculated air velocity near the body surface is fed into a sophisticated thermoregulation model developed at the University of California, Berkeley, so that the local thermal comfort in a non-uniform environment created by personalized air (PA) is rigorously investigated. In this paper, the performances of three different PV systems are investigated, namely, the desk-edge-based PV, PV using a movable panel (MP), and chair-based PV. The results exhibit reasonable agreement with the experimental measurements. The three types of PV are all able to lower human exposure to ambient room pollutants and bring a “cool head” thermal condition favorable for thermal comfort. The present work illustrates that in the development of localized personal environmental control systems, an NTM coupled with a human-body thermal regulation model is a useful tool for visualizing thermal comfort and ventilation effectiveness.