Studies of elderly thermal comfort in outdoor environments in severe cold area of China

Abstract

With the increasing of the elderly population in the world, they currently face some serious problems. The elderly and non-elderly people have distinctly different in terms of outdoor thermal environment sensitivity cause by the dropping physiological function of the elderly, especially in severe cold area where the external environment is harsh and the outdoor activities of elderly are rather uncomfortable. Therefore it is important to conduct the study of thermal comfort of elderly in severe cold area. In this paper, continuous field measurements and questionnaire survey during two seasons have been carried out, to get physical parameter of microclimate, thermal comfort and thermal sensation vote of elderly. The findings confirm a strong relationship between microclimatic and comfort conditions. The elderly feel more comfortable at the tree-shaded area in summer and at open square in winter. Compare with male elderly, female have more sensitive to the cold weather in winter season. In contrast, female have a slight higher heat resistance than male in summer season. Moreover, the thermal neutral temperature of outdoor PET in Changchun is 8.4–19.7 °C. Compared with other research results, the thermal neutral temperature range of elderly is narrow. It is expected that all above results provides the base data for further improvement on microclimate and elderly thermal comfort in severe cold regions.