comfort

In France, for historical and demographic reasons, many educational buildings must be retrofitted in the next years.However, various studies showed that measurements of energy savings, and improvement of comfort, are rarely applied in the retrofitting operations, because of a lack of knowledge of the decision makers concerning the potential improvements.The program REDUCE of International Energy Agency - ECBCS Annex 36, and studies aiming at promoting the high environmental quality of the educational buildings in France, showed the existence of a potential improvement of the energy efficie

Ventilation is essential for health and comfort of building occupants. It is particularly required to diluteand/or remove pollutants emitted by occupants metabolism. The concentration of metabolic CO2 iswell correlated to metabolic odor intensity. Therefore CO2 concentration can be efficiently chosen asan indoor air quality indicator when occupants are the main pollution source inside the buildings.

The thermal exchanges between the buildings and its surroundings may be easily evaluated from balance equations. However, some parameters in the equations are prone to changesdue to decisions taken by the users at some time, and further decisions and even computations onthermal behaviour may be strongly affected by the users attitudes and actions. This can producewrong computation of energy consumption and savings, and then they have to be avoided. On theother hand, wrong actions of the users or misuses might produce uncomfortable conditions that aredifficult or expensive to handle.

DayMedia and MulCom are multimedia teaching packages targeted at architects and building engineers, as well as students. While DayMedia is concerned with daylighting in architecture, MulCom covers human comfort and the energy performance of buildings. Most of the content is related to thermal comfort, although acoustics and visual comfort are covered as well. The development of the packages has part-funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the Low Energy Architecture Research Unit (LEARN) of the University of North London.

SERRAGLAZE is a breakthrough daylighting system designed to be incorporated into the primary glazing of normal sidelit rooms to save energy and enhance comfort.The paper describes the design, construction and optical properties of the plastic SERRAGLAZE panel, the key component of the system.

Active and passive solar strategies, together with measures of energy conservation and integration of new materials and technologies, can bring a meaningful energy saving in buildings. In particular, if combined with energy saving measures, the use of solar source can strongly reduce the demand of traditional energy sources. However, the use of such technologies is not sufficient if comfort demands of people who live or will live in the building are neglected and if the proposed technologies are not studied for their real suitability.

In experimental chambers, the ventilation effectiveness and thermal comfort of a task ventilation system has been investigated. The method and results of the experiment are presented in this paper. The conclusion of that thermal comfort survey is that task ventilation systems maintain the occupants thermally comfortable while saving energy.

For that study an experiment was conducted during 2 months, in a call center : each week 26 operators returned questionnaires recording their environmental perceptions and sick building syndrome symptoms. In parallel, the recording of their average talk-time was monitored every 30 minutes.The results of that study confirm that increasing outdoor air supply rates and replacing used filters with new ones has a positive effect on health, comfort and productivity of workers.

In this paper the authors in order to reach the objective of a global approach of comfort by a spatial statistical study of the various discomforts, apply a multi-criteria analysis based on ELECTRE II method adapted to the comfort of air-conditioned indoor environment.

Past research (ASHRAE RP-884) demonstrated that occupants of naturally ventilated buildings are comfortable in a wider range of temperatures than occupants of buildings with centrally controlled HVAC systems. However, the exact influence of personal control in explaining these differences could only be hypothesized because of the limits of the existing field study data that formed the basis of that research. The objective of ASHRAE RP-1161 was to quantitatively investigate how