Abstract
Human environmental perception leads occupants’ behaviour when interacting with buildings components, affecting the final building energy performance. A solid understanding of human comfort perception includes simultaneous multisensory stimuli and cross-modal interactions among different comfort domains. This study aims to explore the cross-modal effect between thermal and acoustic domains. Each of the 40 subjects took part in a multisensory survey under two different stationary environmental temperature settings. Results show that people in thermally warm conditions are less confident in describing the provided acoustic records. To perform the same procedure but providing a decreasing air temperature ramp would lead to a better interpretation of the results of this campaign.
Highlights
Occupants' behaviour significantly impacts building energy performance [1], [2]
Some studies focused on the combined effect of thermal and acoustic comfort spheres on subjects’ cognitive performance and overall comfort perception to provide guidelines for a better design of air-conditioning and ventilation systems in workplaces [11]–[15]
The presented experiment focused on the impact of thermal stimuli on environmental comfort and environmental acoustic perception
Summary
Occupants' behaviour significantly impacts building energy performance [1], [2]. It strongly relates to their environmental perception [3], which can be defined as ‘human comfort’ when a cognitive process elaborates several environmental multisensory stimuli collected by the body with a positive psychological response. A deeper understanding of the mechanism beyond human comfort perceptions and domains is needed to quantify existing interactions among different comfort spheres, according to different indoor-outdoor contexts [10]. Some studies focused on the combined effect of thermal and acoustic comfort spheres on subjects’ cognitive performance and overall comfort perception to provide guidelines for a better design of air-conditioning and ventilation systems in workplaces [11]–[15]. Alm et al [11] observed that a 1 °C change in operative temperature impacts the overall perception as a 3.8 dB(A) change in sound pressure level. Pellerin and Candas pointed out a decrease in acoustic sensation under thermal conditions far from neutrality and a worsening in thermal perception due to a rise in noise level [12], [16]
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