Human Thermal Comfort

Thermal comfort is a desirable state familiar to all people. Providing inspirational indoor and outdoor environments that provide thermal comfort, in the context of energy use and climate change, is a challenge for the 21st century. This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of thermal comfort from principles and theory to practical application.

The book begins with current knowledge and understanding of thermal comfort and its application to providing thermal conditions for indoor and outdoor environments. It integrates and presents new ideas to provide a comprehensive model of thermal comfort so that we can move on from the 20th and early 21st century and provide a focus for developments for future decades.

This book will be of interest to practitioners and students and anyone involved with fields such as environmental design, physiology, ergonomics, human factors, industrial hygiene, architecture, health and safety and air conditioning.

• Provides current thermal comfort standards and regulations

• Describes the PMV, PPD, ET* and SET thermal comfort indices

• Discusses adaptive thermal comfort, adaptive opportunity and explains why we have not moved towards a more dynamic and interactive approach to providing thermal comfort

• Presents a new model relating thermal discomfort to performance

• Shows how to construct a computer model of thermal comfort

• Offers how to conduct a thermal comfort survey

Human Thermal Comfort provides new ideas for achieving thermal comfort for offices, vehicles, atriums, and plazas of the future.