Effects of fabric air permeability, open apertures and fit on clothing ventilation in some body regions during light work

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Wearer comfort decreases when the humidity in the clothing microclimate increases. Our research demonstrated an inverse relationship between the ventilation rate of the clothing microclimate and its vapor concentration for various sweat rates, demonstrating the importance of ventilation through fabrics and apertures of the clothing in order to keep the wearer comfortable.Furthermore, the air exchange rate was measured in some body regions using a trial measuring system, and the effects of fabric air permeability, open apertures and fit (tight/loose) of clothes on clothing ventilation were examined under four conditions : standing and walking, with and without air movement. The results indicated that clothing ventilation is modified by wind and body movement and that clothing ventilation was increased in the back, upper arms and legs region by the improvement of fabric air permeability, in the upper and lower limbs by a loose fit, and in the trunk and upper limbs region by openings at neck, skirt, and wrist cuffs.An evaluation method was proposed for the design of clothes with efficient ventilation, which uses the calculation of "required ventilation" : the ideal amount of ventilation by which all sweat produced in a certain body region could be removed from the skin to the outside of the clothes, hence keeping skin humidity low and maintaining comfort. For this purpose knowledge of regional sweat rates in different work situations is required, which is impractical to determine. Therefore we deduced equations describing regional sweat rate as fraction of whole body sweat rate from a series of results of 30-minute exercise tests. The regional sweat rate for calculating required ventilation can easily be obtained by means of these formulas when the total sweat rate is estimated according to overall weight loss during exercise.