Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Principles and Practice

Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Principles and Practice PDF Author: Fergus Nicol
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136336478
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book

Book Description
The fundamental function of buildings is to provide safe and healthy shelter. For the fortunate they also provide comfort and delight. In the twentieth century comfort became a 'product' produced by machines and run on cheap energy. In a world where fossil fuels are becoming ever scarcer and more expensive, and the climate more extreme, the challenge of designing comfortable buildings today requires a new approach. This timely book is the first in a trilogy from leaders in the field which will provide just that. It explains, in a clear and comprehensible manner, how we stay comfortable by using our bodies, minds, buildings and their systems to adapt to indoor and outdoor conditions which change with the weather and the climate. The book is in two sections. The first introduces the principles on which the theory of adaptive thermal comfort is based. The second explains how to use field studies to measure thermal comfort in practice and to analyze the data gathered. Architects have gradually passed responsibility for building performance to service engineers who are largely trained to see comfort as the ‘product’, designed using simplistic comfort models. The result has contributed to a shift to buildings that use ever more energy. A growing international consensus now calls for low-energy buildings. This means designers must first produce robust, passive structures that provide occupants with many opportunities to make changes to suit their environmental needs. Ventilation using free, natural energy should be preferred and mechanical conditioning only used when the climate demands it. This book outlines the theory of adaptive thermal comfort that is essential to understand and inform such building designs. This book should be required reading for all students, teachers and practitioners of architecture, building engineering and management – for all who have a role in producing, and occupying, twenty-first century adaptive, low-carbon, comfortable buildings.

Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Principles and Practice

Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Principles and Practice PDF Author: Fergus Nicol
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136336478
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book

Book Description
The fundamental function of buildings is to provide safe and healthy shelter. For the fortunate they also provide comfort and delight. In the twentieth century comfort became a 'product' produced by machines and run on cheap energy. In a world where fossil fuels are becoming ever scarcer and more expensive, and the climate more extreme, the challenge of designing comfortable buildings today requires a new approach. This timely book is the first in a trilogy from leaders in the field which will provide just that. It explains, in a clear and comprehensible manner, how we stay comfortable by using our bodies, minds, buildings and their systems to adapt to indoor and outdoor conditions which change with the weather and the climate. The book is in two sections. The first introduces the principles on which the theory of adaptive thermal comfort is based. The second explains how to use field studies to measure thermal comfort in practice and to analyze the data gathered. Architects have gradually passed responsibility for building performance to service engineers who are largely trained to see comfort as the ‘product’, designed using simplistic comfort models. The result has contributed to a shift to buildings that use ever more energy. A growing international consensus now calls for low-energy buildings. This means designers must first produce robust, passive structures that provide occupants with many opportunities to make changes to suit their environmental needs. Ventilation using free, natural energy should be preferred and mechanical conditioning only used when the climate demands it. This book outlines the theory of adaptive thermal comfort that is essential to understand and inform such building designs. This book should be required reading for all students, teachers and practitioners of architecture, building engineering and management – for all who have a role in producing, and occupying, twenty-first century adaptive, low-carbon, comfortable buildings.

Concepts in Thermal Comfort

Concepts in Thermal Comfort PDF Author: M. David Egan
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book

Book Description


Materials for Energy Efficiency and Thermal Comfort in Buildings

Materials for Energy Efficiency and Thermal Comfort in Buildings PDF Author: Matthew R Hall
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1845699270
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 760

Get Book

Book Description
Almost half of the total energy produced in the developed world is inefficiently used to heat, cool, ventilate and control humidity in buildings, to meet the increasingly high thermal comfort levels demanded by occupants. The utilisation of advanced materials and passive technologies in buildings would substantially reduce the energy demand and improve the environmental impact and carbon footprint of building stock worldwide. Materials for energy efficiency and thermal comfort in buildings critically reviews the advanced building materials applicable for improving the built environment. Part one reviews both fundamental building physics and occupant comfort in buildings, from heat and mass transport, hygrothermal behaviour, and ventilation, on to thermal comfort and health and safety requirements. Part two details the development of advanced materials and sustainable technologies for application in buildings, beginning with a review of lifecycle assessment and environmental profiling of materials. The section moves on to review thermal insulation materials, materials for heat and moisture control, and heat energy storage and passive cooling technologies. Part two concludes with coverage of modern methods of construction, roofing design and technology, and benchmarking of façades for optimised building thermal performance. Finally, Part three reviews the application of advanced materials, design and technologies in a range of existing and new building types, including domestic, commercial and high-performance buildings, and buildings in hot and tropical climates. This book is of particular use to, mechanical, electrical and HVAC engineers, architects and low-energy building practitioners worldwide, as well as to academics and researchers in the fields of building physics, civil and building engineering, and materials science. Explores improving energy efficiency and thermal comfort through material selection and sustainable technologies Documents the development of advanced materials and sustainable technologies for applications in building design and construction Examines fundamental building physics and occupant comfort in buildings featuring heat and mass transport, hygrothermal behaviour and ventilation

Standards for Thermal Comfort

Standards for Thermal Comfort PDF Author: M. Humphreys
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135273502
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Current Standards for Indoor Air Temperature are inappropriate in many regions of the world. This forces designers to use highly serviced buildings to achieve air temperatures that accord with the standards to the detriment of the local and global environment. Standards for Thermal Comfort brings together contributions from around the world, reflecting new approaches to the setting of standards which can apply to all climates and cultures.

Human Thermal Comfort

Human Thermal Comfort PDF Author: Ken Parsons
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000764613
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
Thermal comfort is a desirable state familiar to all people. Providing inspirational indoor and outdoor environments that provide thermal comfort, in the context of energy use and climate change, is a challenge for the 21st century. This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of thermal comfort from principles and theory to practical application. The book begins with current knowledge and understanding of thermal comfort and its application to providing thermal conditions for indoor and outdoor environments. It integrates and presents new ideas to provide a comprehensive model of thermal comfort so that we can move on from the 20th and early 21st century and provide a focus for developments for future decades. This book will be of interest to practitioners and students and anyone involved with fields such as environmental design, physiology, ergonomics, human factors, industrial hygiene, architecture, health and safety and air conditioning. • Provides current thermal comfort standards and regulations • Describes the PMV, PPD, ET* and SET thermal comfort indices • Discusses adaptive thermal comfort, adaptive opportunity and explains why we have not moved towards a more dynamic and interactive approach to providing thermal comfort • Presents a new model relating thermal discomfort to performance • Shows how to construct a computer model of thermal comfort • Offers how to conduct a thermal comfort survey Human Thermal Comfort provides new ideas for achieving thermal comfort for offices, vehicles, atriums, and plazas of the future.

Routledge Handbook of Resilient Thermal Comfort

Routledge Handbook of Resilient Thermal Comfort PDF Author: Fergus Nicol
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000553582
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 654

Get Book

Book Description
This book brings together some of the finest academics in the field to address important questions around the way in which people experience their physical environments, including temperature, light, air-quality, acoustics and so forth. It is of importance not only to the comfort people feel indoors, but also the success of any building as an environment for its stated purpose. The way in which comfort is produced and perceived has a profound effect on the energy use of a building and its resilience to the increasing dangers posed by extreme weather events, and power outages caused by climate change. Research on thermal comfort is particularly important not only for the health and well-being of occupants but because energy used for temperature control is responsible for a large part of the total energy budget of the built environment. In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the vulnerabilities of the thermal comfort system; how and why are buildings failing to provide safe and agreeable thermal environments at an affordable price? Achieving comfort in buildings is a complex subject that involves physics, behaviour, physiology, energy conservation, climate change, and of course architecture and urban design. Bringing together the related disciplines in one volume lays strong, multi-disciplinary foundations for new research and design directions for resilient 21st century architecture. This book heralds workable solutions and emerging directions for key fields in building the resilience of households, organisations and populations in a heating world.

Indoor Thermal Comfort Perception

Indoor Thermal Comfort Perception PDF Author: Kristian Fabbri
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319186515
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book

Book Description
Providing a methodology for evaluating indoor thermal comfort with a focus on children, this book presents an in-depth examination of children’s perceptions of comfort. Divided into two sections, it first presents a history of thermal comfort, the human body and environmental parameters, common thermal comfort indexes, and guidelines for creating questionnaires to assess children’s perceptions of indoor thermal comfort. It then describes their understanding of the concepts of comfort and energy, and the factors that influence that perception. In this context, it takes into account the psychological and pedagogical aspects of thermal comfort judgment, as well as architectural and environmental characteristics and equips readers with the knowledge needed to effectively investigate children’s perspectives on environmental ergonomics. The research field of indoor thermal comfort adopts, on the one hand, physical parameter measurements and comfort indexes (e.g. Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) or adaptive comfort), and on the other, an ergonomic assessment in the form of questionnaires. However the latter can offer only limited insights into the issue of comfort, as children often use different terms than adults to convey their experience of thermal comfort. The books aims to address this lack of understanding with regard to children’s perceptions of indoor thermal comfort. The book is intended for HVAC engineers and researchers, architects and researchers interested in thermal comfort and the built environment. It also provides a useful resource for environmental psychologists, medical and cognitive researchers.

Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Foundations and Analysis

Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Foundations and Analysis PDF Author: Michael Humphreys
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317658566
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book

Book Description
There has been widespread dissatisfaction with accepted models for predicting the conditions that people will find thermally comfortable in buildings. These models require knowledge about clothing and activity, but can give little guidance on how to quantify them in any future situation. This has forced designers to make assumptions about people’s future behaviour based on very little information and, as a result, encouraged static design indoor temperatures. This book is the second in a three volume set covering all aspects of Adaptive Thermal Comfort. The first part narrates the development of the adaptive approach to thermal comfort from its early beginnings in the 1960s. It discusses recent work in the field and suggests ways in which it can be developed and modelled. Such models can be used to set dynamic, interactive standards for thermal comfort which will help overcome the problems inherited from the past. The second part of the volume engages with the practical and theoretical problems encountered in field studies and in their statistical analysis, providing guidance towards their resolution, so that valid conclusions may be drawn from such studies.

Outdoor Thermal Comfort in Urban Environment

Outdoor Thermal Comfort in Urban Environment PDF Author: Kevin Ka-Lun Lau
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811652457
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book

Book Description
This book highlights the importance of outdoor thermal comfort for improving urban living quality in the context of urban planning and urban geometry design. It introduces readers to a range of assessment methods and applications of outdoor thermal comfort and addresses urban geometry and thermal environment at the neighbourhood scale using real-world examples and parametric studies. In addition, the subjective evaluations by urban dwellers and numerical modelling tools introduced in this book provide not only a comprehensive assessment of outdoor thermal comfort but also an integrated approach to using thermal comfort indicators as a standard in high-density cities. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable guide for urban climate researchers, urban planners, and designers, and policymakers pursuing more liveable urban environments.

Thermal Comfort Assessment of Buildings

Thermal Comfort Assessment of Buildings PDF Author: Salvatore Carlucci
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 8847052386
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Get Book

Book Description
A number of metrics for assessing human thermal response to climatic conditions have been proposed in scientific literature over the last decades. They aim at describing human thermal perception of the thermal environment to which an individual or a group of people is exposed. More recently, a new type of “discomfort index” has been proposed for describing, in a synthetic way, long-term phenomena. Starting from a systematic review of a number of long-term global discomfort indices, they are then contrasted and compared on a reference case study in order to identify their similarities and differences and strengths and weaknesses. Based on this analysis, a new short-term local discomfort index is proposed for the American Adaptive comfort model. Finally, a new and reliable long-term general discomfort index is presented. It is delivered in three versions and each of them is suitable to be respectively coupled with the Fanger, the European Adaptive and the American Adaptive comfort models.