Thermal Comfort

What is thermal comfort and how does AeroTherm help achieve it?

We regularly describe AeroTherm as being able to improve your thermal comfort or being able to maintain your thermal comfort at a lower temperature but we often get asked what we mean by this.

Essentially thermal comfort is the feeling of being pleasantly warm in your surroundings. This can differ from person to person but there are several key factors beyond the basic room temperature which help influence feeling warm. The 6 main factors include environmental conditions such as  radiant temperature, air temperature, air velocity and humidity. AeroTherm has been designed to take advantage of the available radiant energy and improve how it can be utilised.

All objects absorb and emit radiant energy. This radiant energy consists of a particular bandwidth of electromagnetic waves which pass straight through the air until they hit a solid object, causing it to warm up. Basically the warmer they are, the more energy they emit. These objects will then continue to transfer radiant energy in an attempt to balance with their surroundings. The resulting radiant temperature therefore has a greater influence than air temperature on how we lose or gain heat to the environment.

So in the context of a room in your house, the radiators, cookers, sunlight, light bulbs and people, etc all provide additional radiant energy into the room. This energy is then transferred around the room and between all the solid objects within it. As the walls and ceilings provide a large surface area, these absorb a large amount of the energy. If these are external walls and ceilings, then a lot of the energy is soaked up and transferred to the exterior and then lost out of the building.

AeroTherm is very effective at limiting this process by providing a 1mm internal surface coating which, along with helping to prevent conductive heat transfer, is constantly working to rapidly balance the radiant energy transfer in a room. As it is able to warm up very quickly, its ability to emit radiant energy becomes greater. As this is all happening at the speed of light, it is essentially reflecting the radiant thermal energy around the room and quickly warming up the occupants in the room, providing thermal comfort.

A useful article explaining the six basic factors of thermal comfort can be found on the HSE website