Design with Comfort: Expanding the psychrometric chart with radiation and convection dimensions

Abstract

We present an expansion of the psychrometric chart for thermal comfort analysis using a new contour shading method that demonstrates a wider range of potential comfort conditions through the incorporation of additional comfort parameters. These extra dimensions include mean radiant temperature, air movement, metabolic rate, skin wettedness and the transitional behavior of occupants. The representations allow us to think outside the thermal comfort box with the use of innovative thermal design and comfort feedback for occupants. Building on the Olgyay bioclimatic chart, allowing architects to “Design with Climate”, the new chart vizualizes a wide range of conditions that illustrate a physical basis for expanding comfort zones. It uses basic spatially invariant metrics employed in adaptive and other comfort models to allow "design with comfort" across all thermal comfort variables. The development of these methods has resulted in an open-source repository and web app available for designers and researchers to reproduce the charts and color-shading for their own projects.