STUDY ON THERMAL COMFORT

DEFINITION
 Thermal comfort : It is defined as the state of mind in
humans that expresses satisfaction with the surrounding
environment (ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55).
 The sick building syndrome (SBS): A situation in
which the occupants of a building experience acute
health- or comfort-related effects that seem to be linked
directly to the time spent in the building.
FACTORS AFFECTING COMFORT
 Personal factor:
 Insulative clothing (clo)
 Activity level (Met)
 Physical factors:
 Air temperature
 Mean radiant temperature
 Relative humidity
 Air movement
 Atmospheric pressure
 Color, Odor, Light intensity, Noise level
 Organic factors:
 Age;
 Gender;
 geographic location
HUMAN THERMOREGULATION
 Vasodilation (Increase/ decrease blood flow)
 Sweating/ Shivering
 Environmental adaptation
WHY REGULATE ENVIRONMENT
 Optimum level of thermal comfort helps in increasing
productivity
THERMAL COMFORT SCALE
 Measurement of thermal comfort levels are complex
 A single scale which combines the effects of various
thermal comfort factors is called Thermal index or
comfort scale
 Fanger’s thermal comfort model is used to calculate PMV
SUBJECTIVE COMFORT MEASUREMENT
 Set the environmental factors: Temperature; air velocity;
humidity
 The Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) refers to a thermal scale
that runs from Cold (-3) to Hot (+3)
COMFORT LIMITS
EXPERIMENT
 Use LSI Heat Sheild meter to measure the environmental
parameters
 Feed the data into the software and calculate PMV and
PPD