Thermal regulation and its impacts on human comfort and energy efficiency

• Main Author: Xiang, Zhenhui
• Other Authors: Soh Yeng Chai
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/68266
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Over the last few decades, there has been many researches done on the indoor thermal comfort as well as the energy demand in buildings for heating and cooling. The existing heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) system consumes a substantial portion of energy in commercial buildings, roughly 40% of total energy consumption of the building. [1] Researchers were looking for new energy efficient solutions of HVAC designs, which could able to meet the human thermal comfort requirements as well. The energy consumption and thermal comfort are closely related with climate and other factors. The globally adopted thermal comfort assessment model is Fanger’s predicted mean vote model (PMV). However, this model has some limitations such as people who undergone the experiments are from a narrow range of age group; in addition, the experiment environment was under moderate thermal climate zones only. In order to find a more energy efficient HVAC system design, one must find a suitable thermal comfort model which best suits the climate and the region, as well as the building types. The new model should be able to meet the requirements of a large group of peoples’ thermal comfort expectation, and predict the thermal perception of building occupants with high accuracy. In this study, the scope was to find thermal comfort model by using three types of regression models. The building type was fixed to HVAC office buildings. The experiment regions were in coastal cities under tropical (hot-humid) climate. The experimental data were extracted from public available AHSRAE RP-884 project.