Study on the personal air-conditioning system considering human thermal adaptation

A personal air-conditioning system (PACS) considering the human thermal adaptability is analyzed. Although the conventional personal air-conditioner was proved to be satisfactory in providing for the thermal comfort, it is being questioned in the term of its energy efficiency. Therefore, it is important and urgent to develop new types of PACS with sustainable control strategy that can ensure energy saving and thermal comfort simultaneously. The problems of the conventional PACS with field interview and laboratory experiment in terms of usage, management and thermal comfort are examined, and the energy-saving PACS considering the human thermal adaptation in succession are proposed. 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 personal air-conditioning unit according to the proposal. The results help to illustrate the alleviation effect of the PACS, and indicate that the thermal alleviation time is useful to maintain the thermal comfort with efficient usage of energy. Finally the recommendations for the sustainable control on the new PACS are summarized by the examination on the results.