Thermal Environment and Thermal Comfort in University Classrooms during the Heating Season

Abstract

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the effects of indoor thermal environments on human physical and mental health. This paper aimed to study the current status of the thermal environment and thermal comfort in the classrooms of Northeastern University during the heating season. The indoor thermal environment was analyzed with the use of field measurements, a subjective questionnaire, regression statistics, and the entropy weight method. The results show that personnel population density is an important factor affecting the temperature and relative humidity variations in classrooms. The results also show that the temperature and relative humidity in a lecture state are respectively 4.2 °C and 11.4% higher than those in an idle state. In addition, in university classrooms in Shenyang, the actual thermal neutral temperature is 2.5 °C lower than the predicted value of the Predicted Mean Vote. It was found that increasing indoor relative humidity can effectively improve the overall thermal comfort of subjects. Furthermore, the temperature preference of women was higher than that of men. Therefore, when setting the initial heating temperature, the personnel population density and sufficient indoor relative humidity have been identified as the key factors for improving the thermal environment of the classroom.

Indoor Environmental Quality and Occupant Comfort

“…They cover a diverse range of occupant types, including studies on the elderly [14], visually impaired individuals [15], and infants [16]. The examined architectural types and geographic locations also vary, including historical residents in Zanzibar [17], school buildings under both severely cold areas in China [18] and mild climate areas in Japan [16], and office buildings in North China and America [19]. These articles have investigated the impact of acoustic [15,20], lighting [14], and thermal [16][17][18][19] indoor environmental quality on comfort.…”

Predicted mean vote model for thermal comfort evaluation of pregnant women considering the effects of metabolic rate

“…Moreover, the correction factor k was used to correct the direction angle of the PMV regression model, and the correction margin l was the intercept of the correction equation, as shown in equations ( 8)-( 11). 58,59 This method has previously been used to obtain a modified model of the PMV. This method was used to obtain the corrected result of the PMV model for pregnant women as PMVe = 0.60PMV + 0.17.…”

Occupant’s Thermal Perception in Mixed-mode Office Buildings of the Tropical Climate

“…Building energy efficiency guidelines for Nigeria (BEEG, 2017) declared that, globally, office buildings account for 50 -60% of total electricity consumption, most of which goes to cooling systems (Adamu, Gillott, & Boukhanouf, 2019). This has called for the professionals of the building industry to aggressively face the critical challenge of reducing building energy demand (Zhang et al, 2022;Sun & Hong, 2017), through a robust utilization of energyconscious ways of designing and constructing buildings, to counterbalance the universal energy deficit. The global advocacy for the reduction of buildings' energy consumption is largely due to the threats of climate change as contained in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2022).…”