A Study of Thermal Comfort and Occupant Satisfaction in Office Room

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation regarding the effect of indoor thermal to building's occupant satisfaction which is equipped by mechanically ventilated. The investigation is consisted of two parts, in which the first part is to visualise the indoor environmental quality of the office room in-term of air velocity distribution and indoor temperature distribution. Whereas, the second part is to obtain the perception of building's occupants regarding their satisfaction to the indoor air and thermal inside the building. An approach of modelling and simulation was carried out using COMSOL Multiphysics software to visualise indoor environmental quality and an approach of questionnaire was adopted to obtain the perception of building's occupants. The results show that the geometry model also affects to the air circulation and maintain indoor temperature distribution. This evidence occurred when the distribution of indoor air of office room didn’t distributed homogeneously to the hallway as impact of the streamline, but the distribution of indoor temperature is still uniform. Additionally, the condition of temperature inside office room is not a single factor that contribute to the dissatisfaction of building's occupants. Since most of office workers are unauthorized to adjust temperature and air velocity of the air-conditioning system, this contributes to 40% of respondents that are dissatisfaction with temperature and air velocity. Finally, this study found that the relationship amongst indoor environmental quality to produce occupant satisfaction is a complex system that need to be assessed comprehensively. Besides, it is invaluable to advance our understanding of the relationship amongst ventilation system, occupant behaviour, and building energy in tropical climate in assessment of occupant satisfaction.