Abstract
Thermal comfort is one of the most important factors for occupant satisfaction and, as a result, for the building energy performance. Decentralized heating and cooling systems, also known as “Personal Environmental Comfort Systems” (PECS), have attracted significant interest in research and industry in recent years. While building simulation software is used in practice to improve the energy performance of buildings, most building simulation applications use the PMV approach for comfort calculations. This article presents a newly developed building controller that uses a holistic approach in the consideration of PECS within the framework of the building simulation software Esp-r. With PhySCo, a dynamic physiology, sensation, and comfort model, the presented building controller can adjust the setpoint temperatures of the central HVAC system as well as control the use of PECS based on the thermal sensation and comfort values of a virtual human. An adaptive building controller with a wide dead-band and adaptive setpoints between 18 to 26 °C (30 °C) was compared to a basic controller with a fixed and narrow setpoint range between 21 to 24 °C. The simulations were conducted for temperate western European climate (Mannheim, Germany), classified as Cfb climate according to Köppen-Geiger. With the adaptive controller, a 12.5% reduction in end-use energy was achieved in winter. For summer conditions, a variation between the adaptive controller, an office chair with a cooling function, and a fan increased the upper setpoint temperature to 30 °C while still maintaining comfortable conditions and reducing the end-use energy by 15.3%. In spring, the same variation led to a 9.3% reduction in the final energy. The combinations of other systems were studied with the newly presented controller.
Highlights
One hundred and eighty countries of the Paris Agreement set the goal to reduce CO2 emissions and achieve near climate neutrality [1]
Maintaining a narrow deadband frequently leads to higher energy consumption [7], and too-cold or too-hot conditions at the workplace could lead to building-related illnesses such as sick building syndrome [8,9]
The results show that the heating function of the office chair was used because the temperature of the backrest and the seat (ChairTemp_1, ChairTemp_2) increased by 4 Kelvin compared to the dry bulb temperature (DB)
Summary
One hundred and eighty countries of the Paris Agreement set the goal to reduce CO2 emissions and achieve near climate neutrality [1]. For a simplified consideration of thermal comfort aspects, thermal comfort is usually defined by the operative temperature or with Fanger’s PMV model [18] as defined within different standards [19,20] These are the most widely used parameters to predict comfort conditions, they do not allow detailed consideration of asymmetric conditions (e.g., solar influence via large reflective surfaces) or local (dis)comfort of humans, which affect the overall comfort [21]. From both the thermal comfort aspect and the energy efficiency aspect, more consideration should be taken for individual body parts as the discomfort of individual body parts can determine the overall discomfort [22,23] In this context, the application of decentralized heating and cooling systems in offices is interesting, as they act on the people’s immediate environment and take individual body parts into consideration. The objectives of this development are twofold: (1) To provide a numerical tool to investigate the potential of decentralized systems to improve thermal comfort and reduce energy consumption, and (2) to encourage the use of these systems and their integration in new and innovative control strategies in buildings
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