Low-Cost Micro Predictive Mean Vote (PMV) Sensor and its Application for Smart Personal Ventilation Systems

We report a low-cost micro Predictive Mean Vote (PMV) sensor system for human thermal comfort with the improvement of measurement accuracy. The PMV sensor system consists of a Thermoresistive Micro Calorimetric Flow (TMCF) sensor, commercial temperature/relative humidity (RH) sensors and an MCU which can implement the PMV calculation based on ASHRAE Standard 55. Thanks to the excellent resolution (6 mm/s) and high accuracy (±27 mm/s) of the integrated TMCF sensor, the experimental results indicate that the accuracy of our PMV sensor (±0.03) is better than that of the commercial PMV meter (±0.04). Furthermore, a smart personal ventilation system (sPVS) is developed by using our proposed PMV sensor and a PID controlled cooling fan. By regulating the local airflow velocity, it is clear that our sPVS can provide both optimized thermal comfort and energy saving.