Climate Chambers And The Modern Society

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Climate chambers have a long history in the development of modern society, and their use in laboratory experiments has given us many of the product features we love and depend on.

How comfortable are you in the seat of your car? Did you take that into consideration when you decided to purchase it? The last time you bought yoga pants was it primarily for style or comfort? And how often do you check the expiration date on the bottle of Tylenol in your cupboard? Or worry about bacteria in your kid’s chicken nugget frozen dinner? 

Chances are you don’t waste your brain space thinking much about these things. You probably have never asked yourself how the driver’s seat got so easy to sit in or what makes your clothes so comfortable or why you don’t worry about your food and medicine. But it has not always been this way. The first cars had wooden seats and no shock absorbers, but they were better than horses…most of the time. Corsets used to be a staple in every woman’s wardrobe. “Medicine” was unregulated and you didn’t even want to know what happened in a meat packing plant.

Climate Chambers Enter The Picture

Today, there are people whose entire job is to test and test and test your clothes, the seating in your car, and your food and medicine. They sweat the details and they spend all day doing it. They have complex processes and even more complex laboratory equipment because they want you to buy their company’s products. This is where a climate chamber enters the picture. Unless you are a scientist, you probably didn’t know that. 

We live in a modern society with few of the worries that plagued earlier generations. Our life expectancy has doubled during the last century. We expect everything we purchase to meet our needs exactly, last a long time and be a bargain. The truth is that it takes hours of experimentation in well-equipped labs to bring this affordable protection into our lives. 

Temperature control is necessary for almost every scientific experimental process, and as such, temperature-controlled devices are found in all laboratories. Because scientists test multiple independent variables and their effect on a single dependent variable, it is critically important that they be able to measure and regulate temperature exactly. “During an experiment, scientists must prevent outside influences, known as confounding variables, from altering the results. When a scientist actively decides to limit the impact of a confounding variable, it becomes known as a control variable instead. Although it is not always a confounding variable in experiments, scientists will often choose to control the variable of temperature by holding it constant.” Control variables help prevent errors with the experiment.

Comfort Testing In The Laboratory

For example, digital human modeling allows car manufacturers to test hundreds of seat variables related to human comfort. Digital human models are more commonly known as manikins. “The role of the thermal manikin is to measure the resultant influence of the environmental conditions including radiant asymmetries, temporal and spatial changes of the local air movement around the manikin body, ambient temperature, and its shifts as well as heat transfer through surface contact, for example, with seat, furniture, floor, or other objects.” In order to do this, the seats are placed in a climate chamber and the manikin is placed in position. Then chamber temperature and relative humidity are measured precisely over a period of 40 minutes. If the manikin has the ability to “sweat”, the experiment makes it possible to design a more comfortable environment for the passenger. This is just one example of the many ways that climate chambers are used in the laboratory to improve your driving experience.

Climate chambers allow researchers to test the variables of temperature and humidity. It’s important that the equipment have a homogenous and stable temperature and humidity distribution over the entire chamber. Imagine if the manikin “sweated” on one part of its body but not on the other. The research team wouldn’t be able to learn much about how to perfect climate control in the next car you buy. Not all climate chambers are the same. The humidity content of the chamber load, the ambient conditions, and the respective temperature-humidity working range are decisive factors in the selection of the right appliance. The scientist must be able to reproduce and document reliable environmental simulations. In Memmert climate chambers, the high-precision temperature and humidity control — and the heating from all six sides — ensures reliability and an interior free of condensation.

Speaking of humidity and condensation, evaluating functional clothing in a climate chamber is as commonly done as evaluating automotive seats with manikins. Functional clothing is more commonly known as sportswear: t-shirts, jackets, and yes — yoga pants. The jargon is going to get worse for a moment before it gets better. When you exercise you want clothing that allows heat exchange between your body and the outside environment. One of the materials used to manufacture this type of clothing is called “phase change material” or “latent heat storage material” What you experience when you wear “functional clothing” for your morning run in winter is better insulation and greater comfort. “As the wear comfort is directly related to physiological processes, it is possible to measure it quantitatively. An important way to measure thermo-physiological comfort is to perform wearer trials with human subjects. These could be performed either under controlled climatic and activity scenarios in a climatic chamber or under practical conditions in real wearing.” With the climate chamber, researchers are able to keep the ambient temperature and humidity constant, and then measure the wearer’s skin temperature and self-reported comfort level. 

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