Thermal Comfort in Naturally Ventilated Schools

School buildings are among the most important building types that integrate significant aspects of sustainability research: building performance, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality and the benefits of a healthy and productive environment. Providing thermal comfort in classrooms is an obvious necessity because students spend up to one-third of the day in school. Elevated air temperature is a common problem in most school classrooms during periods of increased thermal load; however, it could lead to a reduction in children’s schoolwork performance. In addition, school buildings are major energy consumers due to significant demands for heating and cooling to provide acceptable thermal comfort conditions. Thermal comfort studies and widely used standards have largely concentrated on research with adults. It is argued here that a re-examination of current approaches to thermal comfort for children could inform improved design of school buildings and thereby optimize conditions for students’ performance. To examine the thermal perceptions of children in naturally ventilated classrooms, three sets of field experiments were conducted in primary schools in Shiraz, Iran. The field work procedures consisted of thermal comfort surveys designed for the target age group and concurrent measurements of indoor and outdoor environmental variables. The analysis of the results addresses children’s thermal perception, gender differences, the relationship between children’s indoor comfort temperature and outdoor climate, and adaptive behaviour in classrooms. It is shown that the PMV-PPD model underestimates children’s actual thermal sensation and the percentage dissatisfied in the investigated classrooms. Moreover, the sampled children feel comfortable at lower temperatures than predicted by the ASHRAE Adaptive model during the warm season. The analysis suggests that children may be slightly less sensitive to indoor temperature change but less tolerant to high temperatures than adults. Overall, it appears that children have a warmer thermal sensation than would be expected based on adult-based models and that they require cooler indoor operative temperatures to achieve thermal comfort in the classroom. The results imply that the thermal comfort models given in the standards do not accurately address children’s thermal sensation in the classroom, and they highlight a lack of comprehensive understanding of children’s thermal perception, including metabolism and other physiological factors.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Haddad, Shamila

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/3098

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/57157