Revista de Ergonomia
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Physiological Model Controlled Sweating Thermal Manikin: Can it replace human subjects?

Faming Wang

Sweating thermal manikins are extensively used to assess clothing before performing human trials. Because thermal manikins cannot simulate human physiological responses and psychologicalperceptions, a recent hot research on incorporating various physiological models with thermal manikins has been highlighted. Can such physiological model regulated sweating manikins replace human subjects? A thermal manikin is an instrument which simulates an average human being in terms of body dimensions. The first thermal manikin was introduced in 1940s by the US Army [1]. It was a one-segment copper manikin. Afterwards, more advanced ones such as multisegment, sweating and moveable male and female manikins have been developed as new technologiesadvance [2-5]. The idea of incorporating a human physiological model with a sweating manikin was first proposed in 2005 [6]. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Golden, CO) designed such a physiological model controlled manikin ADAM and used it to evaluate liquid cooling garments. The controlling system is comprised of three units: the sweating manikin, the physiological control model and the empirical thermal comfort model. In this study, the comparison of data from model controlled manikin and physiological data from subject tests was not accomplished due to various reasons such as different test conditions were used. Nevertheless, the comfort and thermal sensations obtained from the model controlled manikin showed expected trends.