Thermal Comfort Of Textile Materials And Its Assessment
Source: Textile Review
Providing Thermal comfort is considered as one of the most important requirement for a clothing system. Every living object seeks for comfort in the surrounding, and clothing systems plays a vital role in this regard by regulating and balancing the heat and moisture transportation from body to the environment and vice versa. The feeling of comfort is relative to the surrounding environment and it need to be accessed adequately. Basic Understanding of Thermal Comfort of Textile Materials, its importance and assessment will be discussed in this paper. This article is part of a series of three papers on Thermal Comfort of Textile Materials. In the next papers, Impact of Environmental changes on Thermal behaviour of textile Material and Various standards used to access thermal behaviour and Thermal Manikins will be discussed.
Thermal Comfort: British Standard BS EN ISO 7730 defines Thermal Comfort as, "The condition of mind which expresses satisfaction with the thermaI environment."
The term Thermal Comfort is somewhat subjective thing which can be treated as psychological state of mind in which the person is feeling too hot or too cold.
Defining Thermal comfort becomes more complex as environmental aspects as well as personal factors need to be taken in the consideration.
The author is Asst. Professor Dept. of Fashion Technology National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT),
Gandhinagar
Originally Published in: Textile Review, September 2010
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