Cross-craft skills: Thermal comfort and its influence on energy efficiency

Thermal comfort is an important aspect of the building design process, as the modern person spends most of the day indoors. Thermal comfort is defined as “a state of mind that expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment” (ASHRAE Standart 55-2004); the definition is easy to understand, but it is difficult to express it in physical parameters. There is extensive modeling and standardization for thermal comfort, which depends on both physical and physiological parameters as well as psychology. The thermal environment itself can be described as the properties of the environment that affect the exchange of heat between the human body and the environment. Research and practice in the field of thermal well-being is not a static field, on the contrary, since the emergence of air conditioning in the built environment, this field has expanded. One of the research highlights was the development of the PMV (Predicted Mean Vote) model by Fanger in the late 1960s (Fanger, 1970), which is used to assess indoor thermal comfort and forms the basis of current thermal comfort standards.

Thermal comfort is a very interdisciplinary field of study as it involves many aspects of different scientific disciplines: building science, physiology and psychology to name a few. This adds to the complexity of the matter. Advances in computing have led to an increased and improved ability to evaluate and model complex physical and physiological states. This meant not only more easily solving the non-linear equations on which the PMV model is based, but also performing complex performance simulations of buildings that were in the design phase to predict the comfort of future occupants.