THE UTILIZATION OF ROOM AND BUILDING COMFORT EQUATION FOR REPORTING THERMAL COMFORT: A CASE STUDY AT LABORATORY BUILDINGS

Abstract

As a tropical country, the government of Indonesia issued energy conservation standards for air conditioning systems in buildings through the Indonesian National Standard (SNI) 6390:2020. However, this SNI has not provided specific calculations to identify the comfort level of parameters in a building. This study aims to provide clear limits by providing conditions for fulfilling comfort conditions for indoor temperature parameters and buildings using a new proposed equation, namely the Room Comfort Equation (RCE) and Building Comfort Equation (BCE). These methods are based on the average ratio of room data parameters to SNI limited by a widening factor of 1% to 5% as comfort temperature tolerance threshold values. RCE is an Indoor temperature measurement compared to the SNI, resulting in a temperature parameter ratio P1 = T1/ TSNI . At the same time, BCE is the sum of the RCE across the building. The room temperature was measured for 4 weeks manually using a digital Environmental meter in four rooms R1−10, R1−11, R1−12 and R1−13 at the Integrated Laboratory and Technology Innovation Center (LTSIT) Building, University of Lampung. The calculation results obtained a temperature parameter ratio (RCE) of 0.958, 1.012, 1.002, and 0.990, so a BCE of 3.96 was obtained. This result shows that the building temperature is ideal by a 5% widening factor, but there are two rooms (R1−10 and R1−11) has a passing tolerance limit of 1% widening factor. This finding successfully identified that the cause was the behavioural factor of busy users during practical hours. These results also show that room temperature comfort is more straightforward to measure and report. Therefore, additional efforts are needed to obtain the ideal/optimal temperature, such as upgrading HVAC systems with distributed adaptive control, which can be an effective temperature control solution while compensating for disturbances due to occupant behaviour and the influence of differing ambient weather conditions.