AT-15-C060 -- Performance of Personalized Heating ✓ Most Recent

Building sector nowadays is challenged by high energy consumption and still rather low thermal comfort. An important cause of these two problems is that currently even the non-occupied spaces are heated or cooled. Seeking for higher effectiveness by providing thermal comfort lead to development of personalized conditioning systems. These systems aim to create a microclimate just around a single user. This allows to adjust the thermal environment to individual needs and the energy is deployed only in the space where it actually needed. Various personalized conditioning systems have been developed in recent years. Much more attention has been paid to cooling and ventilation rather than heating. In this paper, personalized heating system is introduced, which consists of a neck heater, a hand heater and a foot heater. This system was evaluated under mild cool conditions (operative temperature of 64°F (18°C)) and subjective evaluation of 12 human subjects was gathered during two hours exposure. Results show that the personalized heating is able to maintain thermal comfort beyond the commonly used heating setpoint, which gives a potential for energy savings due to higher effectiveness. The present system significantly improves thermal comfort, while the greatest impact is on local thermal comfort of hands and neck. Furthermore thermoregulatory response in terms of skin temperatures of the test subject was monitored. Possibilities of using skin temperatures as a control signal for personalized heating are discussed.