Investigating the gender differences in indoor thermal comfort perception for summer and winter seasons and comparison of comfort temperature prediction methods

Abstract

Formulation of indoor thermal comfort guidelines is challenging task considering the fact that these guidelines are supposed to address both, the expectations of the building occupants' regarding indoor thermal comfort, and optimize building energy use, under aggravating conditions of outdoor climate and availability and price volatility of energy. Therefore, a field survey was conducted to assess indoor thermal comfort in two female and three male dormitory buildings. Afterwards, a comparative analysis of three comfort temperature prediction models (linear, cubic and logistic) was conducted. In total, 971 survey forms were collected during the two seasons (summer and winter). Two-third of the data was used to develop the models, while remaining one-third was used to test the accuracies. Although thermal sensation votes of both genders were statistically different, no statistical difference in indoor comfort temperature between the two genders was observed. Comfort temperatures were calculated as 26.4 °C and 27.8 °C during summer and 22.7 °C and 22.4 °C during winters for female and male occupants respectively, using liner regression method. Following the Griffth's method mean operative comfort temperatures were calculated as 26.8 ± 1.5 °C and 27.6 ± 1.7 °C during summer and 22.7 ± 2.3 °C and 22.3 ± 2.0 °C during winter for female and male occupants respectively. Percentage accuracies of three prediction methods under study showed better performance of logistic regression.