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Thermal Comfort Under Weightlessness Exposure: A Discriminant Analysis

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Abstract

Astronauts under weightlessness or microgravity would have differences in thermal comfort due to several adaptive physiological changes caused by the absence of the gravity. In this study, the Mahalanobis distance discriminant was conducted to investigate the classifications of the mean thermal comfort votes (MTCV) in weightlessness, in terms of the ratio of low-frequency power (LF) and high-frequency power (HF) of the heart rate variability (HRV). The ratio was abbreviated as LF/HF and it represented the balance of the autonomous nervous system and acted as an indicator of the thermal comfort. This study was based on our previous research data that had been acquired from 6 male participants under simulated weightlessness through heard-down bed rest (HDBR) model. Results showed that when LF/HF < 1.442, participants under simulated weightlessness gave comfort feedbacks, including the neutral comfort and warm comfort, while participants under normal condition felt thermally comfort when LF/HF ≤ 1.232 and felt uncomfortable thereafter. When 1.442 < LF/HF < 2.073, all participants under simulated weightlessness reported cool comfort. When the mean LF/HF was greater than 2.073, however, participants under simulated weightlessness reported thermal discomfort. In addition, results indicated that participants under simulated weightlessness could not distinguish neutral comfort from warm comfort, but they could report the cool comfort quickly, which suggested that the human body in weightlessness might be more sensitive to the cool environments. Finally, the corresponding comfortable air temperature (ta) range under simulated weightlessness was estimated as 26℃ ≤ ta < 30℃ according to the discriminant results of the MTCV.

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Acknowledgements

Authors thank all students who volunteered to participate in the experiment. Special thanks to Mr. Bo Shi at the School of Medical Imaging, Bengbu Medical College, for his suggestions on ECG data analysis.

Funding

The research is funded by the Hunan Natural Science Foundation project (2020JJ4078; 2019JJ40264) and the doctoral research project of the University of South China (190XQD061). The work is also supported by the China Scholarship Council (Candidate Number: 201808430249).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Building Environment Control Lab, The University of South China, Hengyang, China

    Hui Zhu, Mingle Hu, Linsheng Huang & Zehua Liu

  2. Indoor Environmental Quality Lab, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Hui Zhu

  3. The First Affiliated Hospital, University of South China, Hengyang, China

    Hua Su

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  1. Hui Zhu
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Correspondence to Hui Zhu or Hua Su.

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The Ethics Committee of the University of South China approved the study protocol that complied with applicable requirements of international regulations. Participants gave their consents to participate in the study.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest. The founding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; nor in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; nor in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the paper.

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Zhu, H., Hu, M., Huang, L. et al. Thermal Comfort Under Weightlessness Exposure: A Discriminant Analysis. Microgravity Sci. Technol. 33, 45 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12217-021-09891-7

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