Modeling and its implications on performance of thermal protective clothing

A great deal of research has been carried out to evaluate the performance of thermal protective fabrics and clothing, using bench-scale tests, full-scale manikin tests, and human trials. Based on the understanding of these tests, a group of researchers developed models on heat and/or mass transfer through thermal protective fabrics or clothing under different thermal exposures [34-36,76,86,98,267,305]. Additionally, some researchers attempted to model the metabolic heat and sweat-vapor transfer through clothing [306-309,311]. All of these models help to explore and understand the mechanism associated with performance, namely thermal protective and physiological comfort performance.

Heat and/or mass transfer models

In the last few decades, many researchers developed analytical models on heat or mass transfer to graphically represent the behavior of imposed thermal energy on and through thermal protective clothing under different thermal exposures [76,86,267]. Various numerical models were also developed to scientifically understand the heat and/or mass transfer through thermal protective clothing [34-36,98,305]. In the following section, various analytical and numerical models on heat and/or mass transfer are thoroughly discussed.