A SIMULATION-BASED ENGINEERING APPLICATION FOR THERMAL CLOTHING DESIGN

Introduction Design and production in apparel industry need cost-effective and user-friendly thermal comfort design software. The design tools should model all thermal functions that are depending on the complex interactive physical behaviours involved in the clothing wearing system, which consists of (1) the human body, (2) the clothing and (3) the external environment. The related physical behaviours may include the thermal interactions among the human body, clothing and external environment, the biological thermoregulation of human body and the heat and moisture transfer processes in textile and air layers. On the other hand, the clothing is practically designed and made with textile materials and various technologies/functional treatments. With the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), it should be possible to simulate and predict the thermal and moisture properties in the complete clothing wearing system including the microclimate flows (Mao et al. 2011; Van Ransbeeck et al. 2014). However few researchers have examined the thermal mechanisms in complete clothed wearing systems including air gaps, using simulation methods (Mao et al. 2011). The complex determination of the air layers using 3D body scanning is recently investigated (Mert et al. 2015).