Critical review of literature tests for defining comfort conditions in outdoor environment in warm conditions

Outdoor thermal comfort is a growing topic, the number of publications increases every year, and many tests have been conducted to find the thermal comfort scale and the response by people to heat stress caused by growing outdoor temperature and sun exposure. The problem of temperature increases has a crucial role on the high perceived heat stress in cities in the hot season. There are different human thermal indices developed, the most used are PET, PMV, UTCI and SET*. The experiments focus on finding the thermal sensation scale related to the thermal environment described with previous mentioned indices. Tests can be done measuring the outdoor parameters as air temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity of public places or by measuring dynamic parameters concerning predefined walking circuit with the integration of questionnaires. Some studies also monitor physiological parameters such as skin temperature or heart rate of the participants to analyze the human body response to heat waves and different walking paths and the thermal stress. In this thesis various tests have been examined and after an introduction on the subject and a view on the thermal indices, a type test has been proposed.