Environmental quality assessment of classrooms

In this work a methodology for indoor environmental quality assessment was applied, based on thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort indices and on their analysis and spatial representation.Object of the study was one secondary school classroom of the Province of Torino (Italy), representative of several typologies of educational buildings, showing unsatisfactory environmental conditions. The study was performed by means of HyperComfort, an informatic tool developed by the Authors, which enables to design and check comfort, and to represent indices graphically.The work consisted of a preliminary phase, aimed at drawing specifications on comfort goals, a measuring phase for room physical chracterisation, and a simulation phase in order to determine comfort conditions and to compare different retrofit interventions. About thermal comfort, the Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied was determined. About visual comfort, the average daylight factor and the uniformity of illuminance were calculated, starting from measured values of lightreflectance. About acoustic comfort, speech intelligibility was determined, using the Speech Transmission Index obtained from measured values of background noise and reverberation time.The representation of comfort indices by means of isometric curves, weighting of thermal, visual and acoustic discomfort areas and the determination of synthetic indicators of environmental quality, allowed to compare different renovation solutions.