Field studies on thermal comfort of passengers in airport terminals and high-speed railway stations in summer

Abstract

In transportation buildings such as airport terminals and railway stations, the thermal comfort of passengers is associated with the energy consumption of HVAC systems. Previous studies did not reach consistent conclusions on the differences in thermal comfort demands of passengers with different dwell times in waiting halls. In addition, the thermal comfort of passengers in various sessions during the departure and arrival processes, such as security checks and walking, was not addressed. Therefore, we conducted field studies in the waiting halls of ten transportation buildings and 12 simulated experiments of departure and arrival processes in five of these terminals, with 10 subjects in each experiment. A total of 1,576 valid questionnaires were collected from the waiting halls. The results showed that passengers were more adaptable to the indoor thermal environment than the results foreseen by the PMV–PPD model. As the dwell time increased, the adaptability of the passengers to the indoor thermal environment was approximately the same. However, the neutral standard effective temperature (SET) and preferred SET increased with time. The current indoor thermal design parameters of GB 50736 can meet passengers’ thermal comfort during short-distance departure and arrival processes. Under low air velocity conditions (< 0.2 m/s), the 90% acceptable indoor operative temperature (Top) ranged from 21.9 °C to 25.4 °C for the security check and from 23.9 °C to 25.2 °C for the long-distance processes.