English

Climate responsive design ensures thermal comfort in buildings without using excessive energy for heating and cooling. This study explores how the relationship between the quantity of north (equator) facing window area, the quantity of thermal capacity and the distribution of thermal capacity in a space can improve comfort and energy efficiency in residential buildings in Australia, and optimise lifetime CO2-e emissions. The study concludes that thermal capacity can improve the thermal efficiency of the simulated structure, primarily through its influence on annual cooling loads.

A current trend is to consider that the presence of free hanging sound absorbers (FHU) installed in Thermally Activated Buildings (TABS) reduces the thermal comfort by lowering radiative and convective exchanges with the cooled concrete slab. In this study we propose a simple thermal model of FHU which may be implemented into building simulation software like TRNSys. This model considers convective and radiative exchanges but also the air flows above and below FHU. Experimentally, we observe that a ceiling coverage of 50% leads to a operative temperature increase of 0.3°C.

Large sets of thermal comfort field data have been analysed in detail to inform generalized thermal comfort standards, but there is specific information that might be relevant to particular projects that is not easily accessed by practitioners. We developed interactive tools that allow users to explore the data and look at the subsets that are most interesting to them because of location, culture, building type, etc.

In Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Mark Lynas describes possible world scenarios as global temperatures rise. The central region of Brazil, where Brasília is located, will suffer major changes in its microclimate.Brasília's built environment has already provided a comfortable indoor and outdoor condition through planned urban design and vegetation.

Visual comfort is important to the wellbeing of people and their productivity. However, too much light in the field of view can cause discomfort and disability glare. Under certain conditions it can even cause accidents. This paper addresses the disability glare created by veiling glare and the effect it may have of reducing the visual performance in outdoor spaces. Veiling glare is a particular case when light is reflected off a surface and causes annoyance or impairment of a task to the person in a particular view angle.

A growing number of businesses are moving towards open-plan offices as a way of encouraging impromptu collaborative problem solving among workers. However, while collaboration increases in open-plan offices, a commensurate increase in general noise can hinder employees that need quieter conditions to prosper. In this paper, the effects of conversational noise within an open plan environment are quantified, and the degree to which noise restrictions compromise problem-solving examined.

This study aims to assess the thermal conditions of an indoor environment deemed unacceptable by workers. For this purpose, Ostracon, a voting device, was developed to record the physical environment at the time a worker presses a button to express a complaint. Ostracon was used to record the opinions of 90 workers about their thermal environment in six offices during the summer. The results show that workers found the indoor thermal environment unacceptable even when the static thermal conditions were within a range that was predicted to be comfortable.

The skin temperature and thermal comfort are closely related and change in skin temperature can predict thermal discomfort even before it is consciously perceived. The effect of changing thermal environment is most significant on the body extremities, particularly hands in cool and head in warm conditions. The skin temperature of the extremities can thus become a feasible control signal for personalized conditioning. In order to use a skin temperature of the extremities in practice as a control signal, it is necessary to measure it in a way that does not hinder a user.

This study is designed to investigate the relationship between the thermal comfort environment and stress using brain wave analysis. To achieve this purpose, an experimental approach in a climate chamber based on PMVs was adopted. Environmental factors were set with the PMV scale ranging from -3 to +2. The brain waves of each of the participants (N=7; males) were measured in six conditions, in the PMV order from cold to hot, i.e. one condition per day. The results suggest that the participants felt least stressed under the PMV 0 and most stressed under the PMV -3 and +2.

Occupants’ attention ability in seven PMV conditions is measured by means of electroencephalogram (EEG) and verbal voting. This can show us occupants’ attention state change by time and environmental condition. To achieve the objective of this study, seven healthy male students’ EEG was measured in seven PMV conditions each. Their EEG was measured in each condition for 65 minutes. EEG was measured on Fp1 and Fp2, and sorted out according to the frequency using power spectral analysis. The following results were achieved.