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A new neurophysiological human thermal model based on thermoreceptor responses, the NHTM model, has been developed to predict regulatory responses and physiological variables in asymmetric transient environments. The passive system is based on Wissler's model, which is more complex and refined. Wissler's model segments the human body into 21 cylindrical parts. Each part is divided into 21 layers, 15 for the tissues and 6 for clothes, and each layer is divided into 12 angular sectors. Thus, we have 3780 nodes for the tissues and 1512 for clothes. The passive system simulates heat exchange within the body and between the body and the surroundings. The active system is composed of the thermoregulatory mechanisms, i.e., skin blood flow, shivering thermogenesis, and sweating. The skin blood flow model and the shivering model are based on thermoreceptor responses. The sweating model is that of Fiala et al. and is based on error signals. The NHTM model was compared with Wissler's model, and the results showed that a calculation based on neurophysiology can improve the performance of the thermoregulation model. The NHTM model was more accurate in the prediction of mean skin temperature, with a mean absolute error of 0.27 °C versus 0.80 °C for the original Wissler model. The prediction accuracy of the NHTM model for local skin temperatures and core temperature could be improved via an optimization method to prove the ability of the new thermoregulation model to fit with the physiological characteristics of different populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air infiltration of buildings has a considerable impact on the energy performance of buildings. Permeability or airflow leakage can be evaluated by introducing the Infiltration Heat Recovery (IHR) factor in the energy balance equation. Conventionally, this factor is computed using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, that is time consuming and not very useful for a fast evaluation of balance energy of a building. This article proposes a Reduced-Order model (ROM) approach to evaluate the effect of the permeability of the energy balance for a building. The ROM, based on the well-known Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) method, is developed in the Modelica modeling language. It is successfully applied to the case study of the air infiltration in the low energy consumption building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]