Thermal balance of human body at local workplace

Abstract

Building thermal technologists are occasionally faced with the problem of creating thermal balance in space-limited places situated in a very large cold hall whose complete heating would not be economical. A typical case may be a small local workplace in a large industrial hall. Such a workplace is usually arranged for temporary and intermittent work of one or several persons. Portable electric radiant panels as sources of heat for local workplaces seem to be convenient due to their directional heat radiation. In practice, local heating is solved intuitively using the method of trial and error, although there may be a chance to develop a numerical method to solve this problem exactly. In this paper, a new computational method is presented to create thermal balance in a local workplace situated in a large cold hall. The method intensively employs view factors in combination with the algebraic radiosity method and metabolic heat output of working persons. Although the radiant heat flows of the radiant panels represent dominant parts of their heat powers, the complete energy characterization of the panels requires adding heat transfers caused by convection. The convective heat transports have been estimated using the Rayleigh and Nusselt numbers.