| Summary: | The growing mechanization and industrialization of society has resulted in more factory being build. More and more people involves in manufacturing enviornment, while people spend 1/3 of their time in factory environment. Thermal comfort is important to maintaining of anergonomic environment for a working place, where the worker might in their top performance in a comfort range. Inversely, if a working place is out of comfort range, the productivity ofworkers will decrease and in a serious case it may lead to sickness (heat, stress, fewer, head-ache and etc) to the workers. Thermal comfort is a subjective variable whereby direct measurement directly is hard to perform, moreover the perception of comfort are too subjective and varies form individual to individual preference. Nevertheless the parameters which affect thermal comfort are; oeprative temperature, relative air velocity, relative humidity, clothing insulation wore by the workers, activity levels performed. Comfort temperature can be achieved by combination of those various parameters. The ideal temperature for a particular enviornment that is prefered by most people is consieder as optimum temperature. predicting of an optimum temperatureshould be emphasized when disigning a working enviornment or factory building (e.g. air conditioning designer).We can predict the optimum temperature by referring to some existing Standards such as ISO 7730-1984 or ASHRAE Standard 55-1981. Those standards were developed based on the subjects involved in sedentary work, however the ctivity level in industrial situations might not be represented when applying such standards. This project is to investigate the comfort temperature preferance by the Malaysian workers in actual working environment. The scope of the study includes assessment on thermal comfort at difference metabolic rate in a control chamber and field investigations in a realistic factory environment.
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