Indoor comfort conditions assessment in educational buildings with respect to adaptive comfort standards in European climate zones

Abstract

Educational buildings across Europe refer to a large amount of structures for which critical interventions are necessary. Particularly, for old buildings, comprehensive refurbishment efforts are essential, in order to enhance the indoor comfort conditions and establish the best possible settings for students and users. Evidently, the above issue is decisive to stimulate and support students with reference to the learning process and aims of the educational system (superior learning performance); this has also a positive effect on users’ interaction with the nearby environment, in terms of social adaptability and health for children and adults. In this context, the main goal is to transform entirely the design of educational building spaces with respect to the initial conditions. To this end, governments often set targets on upgrading and utilizing school infrastructure in the urban district (mostly, for school classes situated in the urban core of the social and local communities). As is well known, the improvement of a building from a building physics point of view is fundamentally related to the attainment of acceptable hygro-thermal, visual and acoustic comfort conditions. On the other hand, limiting the heat flux through the buildings’ envelope and restricting CO2 emissions, is of great importance, from an environmental point of view. However, the complexity and significance to assess educational facilities mostly relies on the use of heating in winter and the absence of cooling systems during summer. In addition, climate change, which results into growing values of the air temperature, makes it difficult to attain acceptable indoor comfort conditions with natural ventilation. To reduce this effect, especially in the southern part of Europe, shading devices, as well as ventilation and cooling systems offer rational approaches to scrutinize the indoor environment. The central points of the present investigation, with respect to the indoor comfort conditions of educational buildings in different climate zones, during the cooling season, are as follows: (a) the retrofit measures to improve the thermal performance during heat waves; (b) how to gain tolerable indoor comfort conditions with or without a cooling; (c) the implementation of adaptive thermal comfort models. A dynamic thermal simulation on three levels (envelope, classroom, school building) has been carried out in order to assess the school building stock and investigate possibilities of improvements . For three different locations several retrofit scenarios have been evaluated by considering adaptive comfort standards (for typical users, as well as for children). Furthermore, to stretch the impact of this investigation, the analysis has been extended for a real case study: the “Modulo Didattico” building in the Smart Campus of the University of Brescia. At last, the integrated workflow of the design process is presented, considering both BIM and BEM data, and demonstrating an interesting application of visualization techniques for assessment of the comfort conditions in the different thermal zones. The study is the outcome of a collaborative workplan between the University of Brescia (unibs, Italy) and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th., Greece).