Study on Car Air Conditioning System Controlled by Car Occupants' Skin Temperatures - Part 2: Development of a New Air Conditioning System

With development of high grade and high performance vehicles, there's a growing demand for improvement of thermal comfort in the car. Such comfort is evaluated by the passenger's thermal sensations, such as “hot” or “cold”. For improvement, we need to develop an air conditioning system which can reflect the passenger's sensory feelings as a thermal sensation. In part 1, we described thermal sensation of a passenger in a car depends on not only the skin temperature, but also the rate of change of the skin temperature, and we propose a thermal sensation evaluating equation. For this paper, we used this equation to replace the thermal sensation with the skin temperature, and studied a system which reflects the thermal sensations through on air conditioning control based on the skin temperature. We also verified the advantages of the system under various thermal conditions.