Abstract
In this paper, a personal air-conditioning system considering the human thermal adaptability is analyzed. Although the conventional personal air-conditioner was proofed to be satisfactory in providing for the thermal comfort, it is being questioned on the term of its energy efficiency. Therefore, it is important and urgent to develop new types of personal air-conditioning system with sustainable control strategy that can ensure energy saving and thermal comfort simultaneously. In this study, we first examined the problems of the conventional personal air-conditioning system with field interview and laboratory experiment in terms of usage, management and thermal comfort, and proposed the energy-saving personal air-conditioning system considering the human thermal adaptation. Then a laboratory experiment was performed to analyze the characteristics of the human thermal comfort under severe indoor thermal conditions, which were controlled using a new personal air-conditioning unit designed according to the proposal. The results help to illustrate the alleviation effect of the new personal air-conditioning system, and indicate that the thermal alleviation time is useful to maintain the thermal comfort with efficient usage of energy.
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