An investigation of thermal comfort at high humidities

Conference · Thu Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 1999

OSTI ID:20085607

Fountain, M E; Bauman, F S; Oguru, Masayuki

Climate chamber experiments were performed to investigate thermal comfort at high humidities. Subjective reports were recorded for a total of 411 subjects at frequent intervals during the three-hour experiments with 65 selected subjects equipped with instrumentation to record skin wettedness and skin temperature. The exposures ranged from 20 C/60% RH to 26 C/90% RH with two clothing levels, 0.5 and 0.9 clo, and three levels of metabolic activity, 1.2, 1.6, and 4 met. Clear differences in humidity response were not found for sedentary subjects; however, non-sedentary activities produced differences on several subjective scales. These differences, though, are dictated via heat balance and thermoregulation and cannot be separated from humidity-related effects. For metabolic rates 1.6 met and above, these data suggest that no practical limit on humidity will lower the percent dissatisfied below 25%.

• Research Organization: Environmental Analytics, Berkeley, CA (US)
• OSTI ID: 20085607
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
BUILDINGS
ENERGY CONSUMPTION
HUMIDITY
HUMIDITY CONTROL
MEASURING METHODS
THERMAL COMFORT