Work

MONICA: An integrated thermal manikin for simultaneous thermal comfort and occupant-centred IAQ assessment

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Thermal comfort and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) are two fundamental components of indoor environmental quality that directly influence occupant health, wellbeing, and productivity. However, they are commonly assessed using room-averaged instruments that may not represent the actual occupant exposure. In addition, experiments using thermal manikins, which are instruments that can provide occupant-centred measurements of the indoor conditions, are rarely used to simultaneously assess both components, particularly due to their limitations in measuring both elements at the same time. This study presents the development and validation of MONICA (MONitoring Indoor Comfort and Air quality), a thermal manikin designed for combined thermal comfort and personal pollutant exposure. MONICA incorporates a distributed heating system comprising 71 independently controlled heating segments, a high-resolution surface temperature sensing network, and five integrated multi-sensor pollutant monitoring arrays. The capabilities of the manikin were subsequently demonstrated through experiments conducted in two occupied university classrooms with different ventilation strategies. Equivalent temperature measurements obtained with MONICA followed occupant thermal sensation trends more closely than conventional PMV-based assessment. Pollutant monitoring further showed that the agreement between occupant-centred and room measurements depended on both the pollutant type and ventilation strategy. The experiments also highlighted the trade-off between thermal comfort and IAQ, demonstrating that favourable conditions for one parameter do not necessarily coincide with favourable conditions for the other. The results demonstrate the potential of MONICA as a versatile occupant-centred platform for integrated indoor environmental quality assessment and personal exposure studies, but also highlight the identified limitations and hint at future developments.

Source: Results in Engineering

DOI: 10.1016/j.rineng.2026.112675