Factors affecting on human thermal comfort inside the kitchen area of railway pantry car - a review

Abstract

Railway transportation plays a significant contribution to carrying passengers in India. In which during the journey, pantry cars are involved to serves the food to all onboard passengers. The kitchen atmosphere of the pantry car gets very hot and humid during cooking which could affect occupants’ thermal comfort. Therefore, the current research article describes a review of the factors affecting human thermal comfort inside the kitchen of the railway pantry car. The factors influencing of human thermal comfort inside pantry car kitchens are classified into two categories viz; environmental factors that include “air temperature, mean radiant temperature, relative humidity, air velocity” and personal or individual factors including “metabolic rate and clothing insulation”. All these factors need to be considered in order to achieve the optimum level of thermal comfort inside the kitchen environment of the pantry car. With the assistance of all these factors, we can estimate the thermal comfort indices such as; SET “standard effective temperature,” PMV “predicted mean vote,” PPD “predicted the percentage of dissatisfied,” thereby recognizing the acceptable thermal sensation range for occupants’ (chefs) in the pantry car kitchens during the work period. These kinds of parametric studies can cover a wide group of all pantry car chefs in evaluating thermal comfort. Furthermore, there is a need to apply all the consequences of this research to increase the chef ’s thermal comfort inside the pantry car kitchen while working.

Keywords

• Indoor thermal environment
• Environmental ergonomics
• Pantry car
• Thermal sensation
• Railway

References

1. The article references can be accessed from the .pdf file.