Thermal regulation and impacts on human comfort and energy efficiency

Abstract

Recently, thermal comfort has become a popular topic in architectural field as health, comfort level and working performance is related to this. For better understanding about the physiology of thermoregulation and how environment and personal factors will influence the thermal comfort, toolkit was being developed in order to examine the accuracy of future experiment data as well as provide visualisation for concept of thermal comfort. The toolkit was developed under MATLAB environment. Two sub-sections were in this toolkit. First one is Thermal Comfort Zone toolkit. The user is asked to fill up the values of six primary thermal comfort factors. The input will be shown as point in psychometric chart and determined whether point lies inside the predefined thermal comfort zone. Second one is PMV sensitivity analysis toolkit. Same six parameters values are the input of function. Two parameter interests are selected to plot the graph that shows how these two will affect the PMV index. There is a need of improvements for this first edition toolkit. For the first part, the PMV value need to be refined within the range of -3 to 3 and the verification of thermal comfort zone accuracy is required.For the second part, the boundary drawing algorithm needs to be developed in future time. Relationship graph of metabolism rate and relative humidity cannot be plotted due to insufficiency of research information.