Numerical prediction of degree of skin burn in thermal protective garment-air gap-human body system

Thermal protective garment has been deemed as an important shielding against fire hazard and inflammable gas leakage. The coupling model of thermal protective garment, air-gap, and human body has been widely established, but the heat transfer in air-gap was commonly simplified, resulting in inaccurate results. This paper suggests a coupling heat transfer model of the microsystem consisting of thermal protective garment, air-gap, and human body, taking into account the heat transfer of air-gap, and human skin, its numerical solution is obtained by the finite element method. The degree of skin burn could be extracted and determined from the model, and the effect of heat source, fabric thickness, and air-gap thick-ness on the degree of skin burn are investigated