A Study on the Thermal Comfort under Non-uniform Thermal Environment

Abstract It aims to study the effect of the thermal non-uniformity on human’s thermal responses, and illustrate the other potential impact factors to the overall thermal comfort besides overall thermal sensation in non-uniform thermal environment. Totally 9 non-uniform thermal envi-ronment conditions with locally supplied airflow were created. Subjects’ thermal sensation as well as thermal comfort on the whole body and the body parts were surveyed under the steady state. Thermal comfort was dispersed with a fixed thermal sensation. In most cases, percentages of dissatisfied (PD) were higher than the predicted percentages of dissatisfied (PPD) by PMV-PPD model with the same thermal sensation. The deviation between PD and PPD increased with thermal non-uniformity level. It also increased along with the decrease of the local thermal comfort level, which is induced from the rising of the thermal non-unifomity level of the environment. PD was deduced to be derived from the local thermal comfort besides whole body’ thermal sensation.