Investigation on the indoor thermal comfort in sports settings and an improvement to Fanger model

Abstract

Abstract Player in sports is characterized as large metabolic rate and perspiration, small thermal resistance, low coverage rate of clothing and short breath. The heat transfer from the player to environment is generally strong. It is difficult to accurately predict the thermal comfort of the player in strenuous sports based on the traditional Fanger’s model. To overcome this limitation, an improved Fanger’s model is established on the basis of the original predicted mean vote (PMV) model in this paper. Theoretical analysis of PMV based on traditional model and improved model is performed, and a series of experiments involving 798 surveys in 40 experimental sessions under various sport events are conducted. On this basis, the accuracy of traditional Fanger’s model and the improved model is compared. Results show that the improved model is more reasonable and has better agreement with the experiment results. In both simulation and experiment, the PMV predicted by the improved model is lower than that predicted by traditional Fanger’s model, which indicates that the heat dissipation calculated by the new model is higher. The improved model can predict thermal comfort of human in sports under different thermal environment with higher accuracy compared with conventional Fanger’s model. Finally, based on improved Fanger’s model, reasonable ambient temperature under different exercise intensities is recommended, which is significant to prevent occurrence of heat injury in sports and energy saving of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in gymnasium.