A model of human thermal comfort for analysing the energy performance of buildings

Abstract

Despite numerous studies devoted to a comprehensive analysis of buildings as complex energy systems and, in particular, human thermal comfort, an attempt to combine these two aspects to solve the problems of energy conservation and comfort has been made for the first time. The designed comfort model serves to determine the structure of the human body exergy balance and calculate the minimum exergy consumption and comfortable air temperature. The paper presents a structure of the exergy balance in winter and summer, the dependence of the human body exergy consumption on the mean radiant temperature and room air temperature in winter. We have analyzed various models of human thermal comfort and devised a model of a comprehensive analysis of the system "heat source - human being - building envelope". We have calculated the standard deviation of comfortable room air temperature for different values of the mean radiant temperature, for the exergy model of thermal comfort and the model for which the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) index of human sensation equals to zero. It is found that the standard deviation equals to 1.4 °C. Using thermal comfort models in a comprehensive analysis allows constructing buildings with low energy or exergy consumption and with high-quality thermal comfort.