Dynamic clothing insulation. Measurements with a thermal manikin operating under the thermal comfort regulation mode

The main objective of the present work is the assessment of the thermal insulation of clothing ensembles, both in static conditions and considering the effect of body movements. The different equations used to calculate the equivalent thermal resistance of the whole body, namely the serial, the global and the parallel methods, are considered and the results are presented and discussed for the basic, the effective and the total clothing insulations. The results show that the dynamic thermal insulation values are always lower than the corresponding static ones. The highest mean relative difference [(static-dynamic)/static] was obtained with the parallel method and the lowest with the serial. For I-cl the mean relative differences varied from 0.5 to 13.4% with the serial method, from 5.6 to 14.6% with the global and from 7.2 to 17.7% with the parallel method. In addition, the dynamic tests presents the higher mean relative differences between the calculation methods. The results also show that the serial method always presents the higher values and the parallel method the lowest ones. The relative differences between the calculation methods {[(serial-global)/global] and [(parallel-global)/global]} were sometimes significant and associated to the non-uniform distribution of the clothing insulation. In fact, the ensembles with the highest thermal insulation values present the highest differences between the calculation methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd and The Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved.