Skin Burn Injury Prediction Based on Heat Transfer Simulation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A radiant heater is a promising heating device in electric vehicles to reduce energy consumption and thereby to increase a driving range. The radiant heater locally and directly warms up human body without unnecessarily heating the entire cabin space while offering comparable thermal comfort to drivers and passengers. A concern with the radiant heater is skin burn injury due to an accidental touch with the hot surface of heaters. Skin burn injury is an irreversible thermal alteration in tissues result from denaturation of native state tissue enzymes, proteins, and related structures. Arrhenius models of irreversible thermal alterations in tissues are often used for predicting skin burn based on temperature rise and duration in tissues. In this study, heat transfer simulations were conducted to determine the transient temperature change in a multi-layer skin of fingertip that is in contact with a radiant heater, as shown in Fig. 1. The simulated temperature profiles were imported into an Arrhenius model, and the extent of the burn injury was assessed. With the developed simulation tool, the effects of varying parameters such as the cabin environment temperature the heater surface temperature, and the contact area between heater and fingertip, were investigated.