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A unique measurement device, called StickMan, and a customized vehicle climate control system, were developed to measure thermal comfort under transient and non-uniform conditions inside vehicle. The systems were fully calibrated and then used to characterize the vehicle thermal environments (air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity, relative humidity) at 20 locations. Coupled with a seventeen segment version of the human thermal model TRANMOD (Jones and Ogawa, 1992), one can predict both whole body and local thermal sensation accurately based on the StickMan measurements. Therefore, using a device such as StickMan may reduce the design cycle and costs by eliminating the need of large number of human subjects to evaluate thermal comfort satisfaction in vehicle prototypes.

This paper presents a new transient passenger thermal comfort model. The model uses as inputs the vehicle environmental variables: air temperature, air velocity, relative humidity and mean radiant temperature all of which can vary as a function of time and space. The model also uses as inputs the clothing level and the initial physiological state of the body. The model then predicts as a function of time the physiological state of the body and an effective human thermal sensation response (e.g. cold, comfort, hot, etc.). The advantage of this model is that it can accurately predict the human thermal sensation response during transient vehicle warm-up and cooldown conditions. It also allows design engineers the ability to conduct parametric studies of climate control systems before hardware is available. Here we present the basis of the new thermal comfort model and its predictions for transient warm-up and cooldown conditions.