Thermoregulatory manikins are desirable for evaluations of intelligent clothing and smart textiles

Thermal manikins have been used to measure thermal properties of clothing. The use of thermal manikins has made a step forward in terms of quantifying thermal properties of clothing in a 3-D manner compared with the use of hotplates for material testing. The effects of clothing properties measured on the thermal manikins under steady state (constant manikin surface temperature and constant environmental condition) have usually to be validated by human subject tests. The thermal insulation and evaporative resistance values measured in the constant conditions are also used in modeling to calculate heat balance, predict human thermal physiological responses, and thermal comfort. However, in many real life situations, clothing properties (e.g. moisture transfer), in particular the clothing properties with smart materials, e.g. phase change materials (PCMs), environmental conditions, sweating rate, skin temperatures are neither constant nor uniform. These make mathematical modeling complicated to take into account various transient, non-uniform conditions, and changeable properties of smart clothing which is becoming increasingly popular (Tang and Stylios 2006). Moreover, skin and core temperatures rather than heat loss or storage are commonly used to evaluate thermal comfort, define hypothermia and hyperthermia and evaluate heat strain. Therefore, the direct prediction of thermophysiological responses (skin and core temperatures) based on manikin measurements are valid (Psikuta and Rossi 2009), and could be considered another step forward towards direct evaluation of human-clothing-thermal environment interactions. In the case of measuring a personal cooling system, current standard specifies the measurement of the average heat removal rate from a sweating heated manikin (ASTM F2371-10). This heat removal rate is not constant for the PCMs. The objective of this study was to investigate the gap between the measured heat removal rate of smart clothing with PCMs obtained on a thermal manikin in a stable state, and clothing effects on local human skin and on core temperature, to compare the difference of the results obtained from both methods, and to highlight the need for developing intelligent thermoregulatory manikins