indoor climate

A new thermal comfort guideline for moderate environments has been developed: the ATG guideline. The underlying method distinguishes between ‘type Alpha’ versus ‘type Beta’ buildings to provide for different adaptation effects. Type Alpha indicates buildi

This paper contains a numerical study of the indoor temperature, humidity, and comfort and indoor air quality conditions in a bedroom located in Saint Hubert, Belgium. The performance of the bedroom is presented for a range of constant outdoor ventilation rates (0.1 ach to 1 ach) with and

This paper describes the evaluation and recalibration of the complaint prediction model developed by Federspiel (2000). We collected temperature time-series data and complaint data from six buildings ranging in size from 60,000 ft2 to 800,000 ft2 from three different geographical locations. Using these data, we found a low correlation between the observed number of complaint events and the Predicted Average Complaint Events (PACE) for the monitoring intervals and systematic underprediction of hot complaints.

This paper presents the results of four thermal comfort surveys conducted in naturally ventilated and air-conditioned buildings located in Bari, in southern Italy, during winter and summer seasons. The buildings were of different types, including offices, lecture rooms, and library reading rooms. The

This analysis explores a discrepancy between neutral on the ASHRAE scale and prefer no change on a thermal preference scale. The data employed are from numerous field studies drawn from two large databases. Multivariate analysis showed that the ASHRAE scale vote depended not only on the recognized thermal variables but also on the outdoor temperature, while the thermal preference vote was relatively little influenced by outdoor temperature.

There is a worldwide trend to develop a tool that can provide comprehensive assessment ofbuildings for sustainability. Many efforts were found to propose approaches for energy-savingand resource-recycling, and on the other hand buildings for sustainability should maintain theacceptable indoor environment quality to maintain the occupants health. This paper presentsa comprehensive index, IEI(AHP), composed of the filtered physical indicators, for quantitativeassessment on the built environment.

The stake of sustainable development is to ensure today's and future developments of awealthy and healthy society in a high quality environment. This is also valid for sustainablebuildings that should take account of environmental, economical and social stakes. Thisincludes, among others, low energy use, good indoor environment quality (IEQ) and health.One of the aims of the European HOPE project is to evaluate buildings from these points ofview.

Within the European funded project PeBBu (Performance-Based Building), a state-of-the-artreport on the performance-based building (PBB) approach with focus on healthy buildings isprepared. It deals with methods, guidelines, protocols and tools to design, evaluate andmeasure the health status of buildings or designs for buildings. The health of buildings in thiscontext relates to air quality, ventilation, thermal comfort, noise and visual comfort.After an introduction into PBB, this paper summarizes the state-of-the-art with respect toperformance and healthy buildings.

Macroeconomic analyses indicate a high cost to society of a deteriorated indoor climate. Thefew example calculations performed to date indicate that measures taken to improve IEQ arehighly cost-effective when health and productivity benefits are considered. We believe thatcost-benefit analyses of building designs and operations should routinely incorporate healthand productivity impacts.

This paper is an overview of literature that investigates the effects of general environmentalquality, indoor air pollution, ventilation rates, thermal comfort, temperature control andnumber of persons per workspace on productivity and sickness absenteeism in offices. Thereview includes both self-reported effects and objective measurements of productivity andabsenteeism and both laboratory studies and field investigations. It turns out that a goodgeneral environmental quality increases productivity by 10-15% and decreases sicknessabsenteeism by 2.5 percentpoint.