Thermal stress is an important factor in many industrial situations, athletic events and military scenarios. It can seriously affect the productivity and the health of the individual and diminish tolerance to other environmental hazards. However, the assessment of the thermal stress and the translation of the stress in terms of physiological and psychological strain is complex. For over a centu...

A review is given of outdoor schlieren and shadowgraph imaging, beginning with an historical perspective. The optical principles of the sunlight shadowgraph method and schlieren observation by background distortion are discussed. Examples and illustrations are given of the visualization of outdoor thermal convection, combustion, and explosion phenomena. Jet aircraft and high-speed flight are fe...

Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) is a critical physical quantity that indicates how human beings experience radiation in their surrounding environment. If taken outdoors, MRT depends on the temperature of the sky, ground, vegetation and surrounding buildings, and is therefore difficult to predict reliably. An additional challenge for designers is that publically available simulation tools do not ...

The aim of this study is to identify the most effective thermal predictor of heat-related very-elderly mortality in two cities located in different geographical contexts of central Italy. We tested the hypothesis that use of the state-of-the-art rational thermal indices, the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), might provide an improvement in predicting heat-related mortality with respect to...

Thermal comfort under non-steady-state conditions primarily deals with rapid environmental transients and significant alterations of the meteorological conditions, activity, or clothing pattern within the time scale of some minutes. In such cases, thermal history plays an important role in respect to time, and thus, a dynamic approach is appropriate. The present study aims to investigate the dy...

from building design point of view a basic aim of low energy architecture is to create a thermally comfortable internal environment for building occupants whilst consuming the least possible amount of energy. thus, thermal comfort study has an important impact on energy saving. achieving comfort conditions requires an understanding of the interaction between three groups of factors, namely phys...

Models for human perception of thermal environments included in so-called thermal comfort standards are either based on principles of thermal heat balance, or on large empirical datasets that include human adaptations to different thermal environments (i.e. so-called adaptive approach). The framework for an adaptive thermal heat balance model (ATHB) combines these 2 approaches, improves the pre...