Study on Indoor Thermal Environment Control Based on Thermal Sensation Prediction

Currently the indoor thermal environment control is mainly conducted based on the set points given by room occupants or based on PMV, which might cause problems of unreasonable temperature setting and unsatisfied individual thermal preferences of room occupants. The indoor thermal environment control method based on thermal sensation expression can solve these problems. However, control based on thermal sensation expression might frequently interrupt room occupants’ concentrations on work because this method needs occupants to input their thermal sensations, when their comfortable temperature range changes with the differences of the metabolic rate, clothing level etc. In an attempt to solve this problems, a new indoor thermal environment control method is proposed, which is to collect occupants’ skin temperature measured by infrared imaging to estimate the occupants’ current thermal sensation and predict their future thermal sensations. This paper introduces the control method of the system based on thermal sensation prediction. The control method was verified by building the test-beds and conducting a series of experiments. Experiment results show that 98% of the evaluations are neutral/satisfied/very satisfied with this control system, which means the proposed indoor thermal environment control method based on thermal sensation prediction is feasible for actual application.