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Human body radiation area factors for diverse adult population

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Abstract

Radiation accounts for a significant fraction of the human body and environment heat exchange and strongly impacts thermal comfort and safety. The direct radiative exchange between an individual and a source or sink can be quantified using the effective (feff) and projected radiation area factors (fp). However, these factors have not been quantified for half of the population of the USA with an above-average body mass index (BMI). Here, we address this gap by developing thirty male and thirty female computational manikin models that cover the 1 to 99 percentile variation in height and BMI of adults in the USA. The radiative simulations reveal that the feff and the fp angular distributions are nearly independent of gender, height, and BMI. Appreciable relative differences from the average models only emerge for manikins with BMI above 80th percentile. However, these differences only occur at low zenith angles and, in absolute terms, are small as compared to variations induced by, for example, the zenith angle increase. We also use the manikin set to evaluate whether the body shape impacts the quality of human representation with several levels of geometrical simplification. We find that the “box/peg” body representation, which is based on the hemispherical fp average, is independent of the body shape. In turn, the fp distributions averaged over the azimuth angle range, representing the rotationally symmetric humans, are only impacted to the same degree as for the anatomical manikins. We also show that the anatomical manikins can be closely approximated by the multi-cylinder and sphere representation, at least from a radiation perspective. The developed anatomical manikin set is freely available and can be used to compute how body shape impacts a variety of external heat transport processes.

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Data availability

The manikin models are available on the ASU Dataverse website (https://doi.org/10.48349/ASU/ZCLKT6).

Abbreviations

\({A}_{eff}\) :

Effective radiation area (m2)

\({A}_{p}\) :

Projected radiation area (m2)

\({A}_{t}\) :

Total body surface area (m2)

\(BMI\) :

Body mass index (kg/m2)

\({f}_{eff}\) :

Effective radiation area factor

\({f}_{p}\) :

Projected radiation area factor

\({F}_{s-m}\) :

Sphere-manikin view factor

\(\theta\) :

Zenith angle (°)

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Jason Yalim and Rebecca Belshe from the Research Computing Core Facilities at Arizona State University (ASU) for their aid with the simulation implementation on the ASU supercomputer. The authors also acknowledge Research Computing at ASU for providing High Performance Computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper and partially support from the ASU Fulton Schools of Engineering 2021-2022 seed funding.

Funding

Arizona State University Fulton Schools of Engineering 2021–2022 Strategic Interest Seed Funding Program.

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Author notes

  1. Lyle Bartels, Daniel M. Martinez, and Shri H. Viswanathan contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Konrad Rykaczewski, Lyle Bartels, Daniel M. Martinez & Shri H. Viswanathan

  2. Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Konrad Rykaczewski

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  1. Konrad Rykaczewski
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Contributions

Conceptualization: KR. Methodology: KR, LB, DMM, SHV. Analysis: KR, LB, DMM, SHV. Writing – original draft: KR. Writing – review and editing: KR, LB, DMM, SHV. Final review and editing: KR, LB, DMM, SHV.

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Correspondence to Konrad Rykaczewski.

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Rykaczewski, K., Bartels, L., Martinez, D.M. et al. Human body radiation area factors for diverse adult population. Int J Biometeorol 66, 2357–2367 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02362-7

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