There is increasing concern about the health effects of the severe thermal environmentin urban space. Because of this situation, it is important to estimate the thermal comfortfor environmental improvements and designs. The thermal sensation indices such asSET~* (Standard Effective Temperature) and PMV (Predicted Mean Vote) have beenwidely used in order to evaluate the thermal environment in indoor space. However,these indices are limited application for calm condition if these apply in outdoor space.Moreover, it is necessary to take the influence of solar radiation into those indices inoutdoor space. Now the authors are focusing on thermal sensation of human in outdoorspace and the thermal comfort index based on human thermal load was newly proposedespecially for good estimation of outdoor space. Not only air temperature makes humanfeel hot, feeling temperature is influenced by some urban elements like street landscapeand street plant. Amount of traffic and street plants have effect of course on urban heatbudget and also on human feeling, finally on human comfort. Meteorological factorssuch as relative humidity, solar radiation and wind speed and so on and the physiologyfactors such as skin temperatures, blood flow rate, heart rate and the amount of perspira-tion are introduced into our thermal comfort index. This study has hidden potentials toachieve the maximum results with minimum of energy for urban thermal environmentalimprovement.
展开▼
