Improving thermal comfort of motorcycle helmet by using phase change materials

This paper presents the design of a helmet cooling system using phase change material (PCM) to absorb and store the heat produced by the rider in order to achieve comfort cooling for the wearer. Focus is placed on establishing a computationally efficient approach for solving moving boundary heat transfer problems with two different boundary conditions from both sides of a finite slab which placed in a helmet. A variable mesh finite difference technique is used. The proposed model could be used to explain the effects of physical properties of PCM and its size on the melting time. This paper concludes that application of PCM in a helmet could be effective under various ambient conditions

Keywords:

Thermal comfort , helmet , phase change material (PCM) , variable mesh , moving boundary