MICRO-CLIMATE CHARACTERIZATION OF COMFORT MATERIALS : A CLIMATE ANALYSIS OF HIGH RESILIENCE FOAM IN MICRO-CLIMATE CONDITIONS

Abstract: Currently, it is widely recognised that the operational energy consumption of most building types currently outweighs their embodied energy by some margin. However, as we make dramatic increases in energy efficiency the embodied energy of the materials and components that we use will become proportionally larger and may account for a substantial proportion of the energy associated with buildings in the future. The main factor that might contribute to comfort/discomfort perception is the thermal equilibrium caused by the interaction between a person and the interaction of an object.This is easy to demonstrate as an assumption, mainly in situations where almost the whole body is in contact with the object. The main purpose of this work is to determine important parameters that differentiate different materials and develop new way of working with comfort materials (in particular, soft materials like High Resilience foam and High-Density foam) and characterize them based on their response to temperature and humidity. A literature study is performed to gain more knowledge about current state of foam technology and experimental methods are used to obtain analytical data.To characterize the materials, climate chamber is used to evaluate the materials to determine their properties. From the experiment, the key parameters were determined to be Temperature, Humidity, Vapour pressure and Heat Index. These parameters have a significant impact on the comfortability of the material and hence can be used to determine a soft material’s properties and their reaction to certain environments. The most important characteristics such as temperature, humidity, partial water vapour pressure show that HS materials which 400-450mm of PCR coating have much better sweat diffusion which can be attributed to chemical composition of the material and thermal capacity. The most difficult part micro-climate analysis is to accurately represent what is ‘comfortable’, as comfort is subjective but by using these methods of experiments and analysing methods, the characteristics of the materials can be determined, and a conclusion can be drawn. One of the most difficult things in microclimate testing or testing as such is the repetition of equal processes because it requires experience with the device and the complex process to gain comparable data. There are many variables that were not included in this study due to time constraints but can certainly add to the accuracy of the results. The study was conducted only on two materials over a certain period which can be extended for further accuracy.