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The purpose of the paper is to simulate the effect of clothing insulation and activity on the interaction between the human body and the environment.

A thermo-physiological model, integrated into a Fluent CFD software package is applied. The temperature of the skin surface, clothing surface and heat flux (dry and total heat flux) through layers of clothing with different insulation level are numerically investigated in function of the clothing insulation and the different activities performed indoors.

The increase of the clothing insulation leads to increase of both skin and clothing temperature. Higher temperature difference ΔT between the room temperature and skin temperature provokes more dynamic change of the skin temperature and decreases the thermal comfort of the person. The increase of the metabolic rate, however, leads to more uniform skin temperature, regardless the temperature difference ΔT. With the increase of the clothing insulation for a constant metabolic rate the total heat flux remains constant, but the dry heat flux decreases, while the evaporative heat flux increases.

The joint influence of clothing insulation and indoor activities on the thermal interaction between the body and the environment is assesses using a thermo-physiological model, integrated in a CFD software package.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate a thermophysiological human body model into a CFD simulation to predict the dry and latent body heat loss, the clothing, skin and core temperature, skin wettedness and periphery blood flow distribution. The integration of the model allows to generate more realistic boundary conditions for the CFD simulation and allows to predict the room distribution of temperature and humidity originating from the occupants.

A two-dimensional thermophysiological body model is integrated into a CFD simulation to predict the interaction between the human body and room environment. Parameters varied were clothing insulation and metabolic activity and supply air temperature. The body dry and latent heat loss, skin wettedness, skin and core temperatures were predicted together with the room air temperature and humidity.

Clothing and metabolic activity were found to have different level of impact on the dry and latent heat loss. Heat loss was more strongly affected by changes in the metabolic rate than in the clothing insulation. Latent heat loss was found to exhibit much larger variations compared to dry heat loss due to the high latent heat potential of water.

Unlike similar studies featuring naked human body, clothing characteristics like sensible resistance and vapor permeability were accommodated into the present study. A method to ensure numerical stability of the integrated simulation was developed and implemented to produce robust and reliable simulation performance.