thermal environment

This paper presents some results from the Work Package 5 in the HealthVent project supported by the European Commission. One of the objectives of the project has been to review and critically evaluate the existing requirements on ventilation and IAQ defined in national building codes and European standards. The project’s focus has been set on ventilation rates, pollutants, noise, temperature and draft in dwellings, offices, schools and kindergartens. This paper presents a summary of the values given in European regulations and results of comparisons.

In recent years school buildings, containing the workshop in high school, are old in Japan. Therefore most of them need renovating. Any air-conditioning systems are not often installed in the workshops. Workshops without air-conditioning systems often have bad indoor thermal environments. Since bad thermal environment is exhausting and likely to cause some accidents, eco-renovation method for improvement of thermal environment is required. In this paper, various kinds of eco-renovation methods are examined by CFD simulation.

This paper presents a numerical study of the coupled airflow and thermal environment in asemi-enclosed space surrounded by buildings. Our numerical simulation couples the heat transfercalculation and the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) airflow simulation in which a RNG(renormalization-group) k-? model is used. Both the solar radiation and building/ground thermal storagewere considered in the heat transfer part.

A task/ambient air-conditioning system with natural ventilation was installed in a high-rise office buildingin Osaka, Japan. This paper will report the results of the field measurements of indoor thermalenvironment and natural ventilation opening performances. From the thermal environmental aspect,the office is properly divided into working task zones and a general ambient zone so as to ensureboth occupants comfort and energy savings. Task air-conditioning is for satisfying individual thermalpreferences by using floor outlets.

It is necessary to unsteadily accurately estimate handling and time-related spatial distribution of theindoor environment element in respect of externality meteorological phenomenon and time-varyingmovement of the heating and cooling load in order to carry out the thermal environment design in detail.With the speedup of the recent computer, the unsteady CFD calculation was practically carried out andresults fed back to the environmental design.However, time subtraction interval and convergence decision are appropriately set at the case of theunsteady analysis, and it is necessary to examine

It is difficult to evaluate the effect of indoor environmental quality on productivity by measuring only taskperformance. In this study, the monitoring of cerebral blood flow during task by Near InfraredSpectroscopy is introduced as one of the objective evaluation methods of workers human responsethat are factors affecting task performance.

In the study of indoor and outdoor thermal environment, the analysis and calculation for radiation are adifficulty when the opaque and half-transparent objects exist together, especially for analyzing theindoor environment for atrium, building with large scale transparent envelope and some half-open areawith plants. The traditional method is hard to deal with the long-wave and short-wave radiation issueswhen several opaque and half-transparent objects exist together, and the accuracy description of thethermal environment becomes a problem.

A group of 2-story detached houses is built next to a river stretching from south to north. There aremore than hundreds of houses, called the riverside townhouses in this study, in the construction site. Acoupled simulation of convection, radiation and conduction is conducted to evaluate the outdoorthermal environment from the viewpoint of building arrangement. According to the real weather data,two different wind directions (SSE and ENE) are examined.

The density of Dhaka is increasing exponentially, and with it the demand for residentialaccommodation. Rapid densification is increasing hard surfaces and changing the urbantexture, thereby escalating heat absorption. This intensifies dependency on valuableconventional energy resources, for thermal comfort.Research shows that regional climatic data differs markedly from localised microclimaticeffects within the built environment. In built-up residential areas of the city there is the lack ofnatural wind flow, one of the most important ingredients for comfort during the warmmonsoons.

This paper presents the findings of a short-term monitoring exercise and questionnaire surveyto assess the thermal comfort conditions actually being achieved in 6 Iranian Office buildings.The findings of the questionnaire and monitoring are compared to give confidence that thequestionnaire is accurately reflecting the calculated comfort conditions obtained from thephysically monitoring and site observations.