Abstract
Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) factors usually considered in engineering studies, i.e., thermal, acoustical, visual comfort and indoor air quality are individually associated with the occupant satisfaction level on the basis of well-established relationships. On the other hand, the full understanding of how single IEQ factors contribute and interact to determine the overall occupant satisfaction (global comfort) is currently an open field of research. The lack of a shared approach in treating the subject depends on many aspects: absence of established protocols for the collection of subjective and objective measurements, the amount of variables to consider and in general the complexity of the technical issues involved. This case study is aimed to perform a comparison between some of the models available, studying the results of a survey conducted with objective and subjective method on a classroom within University of Roma TRE premises. Different models are fitted on the same measured values, allowing comparison between different weighting schemes between IEQ categories obtained with different methods. The critical issues, like differences in the weighting scheme obtained with different IEQ models and the variability of the weighting scheme with respect to the time of exposure of the users in the building, identified during this small scale comfort assessment study, provide the basis for a survey activity on a larger scale, basis for the development of an improved IEQ assessment method.
Highlights
The Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) and the Comfort level to be guaranteed to building occupants, become essential factors to take in account when developing an efficient building design
As observed by Humphreys [19], it is possibly not the right approach to look for a universal weighting scheme that can describe the contribution that each single IEQ factor provides in determining the global comfort level, while more effective results could be obtained in one to one category comparison
Small reference are available in literature, but some applicable results can be found in Sofoglu [22], where an artificial neural networks (ANN) model is fitted on objective measurements, linking the concentration of a number of pollutants in office space with the observed frequency of occupants showing sick building syndrome symptoms per square meter
Summary
The Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) and the Comfort level to be guaranteed to building occupants, become essential factors to take in account when developing an efficient building design. It must be highlighted that in recent years the building industry has been giving a priority track to energy saving technologies, both through the development of technological systems with high energy efficiency [3], and promoting the issue of fit for purpose national regulations/standards [4]; less attention was devoted to IEQ improvement and associated monitoring procedures. This has been reflected in recent versions of environmental certification protocols like. The selected type of environment provides a larger sample of simultaneous users per sqm, allowing, when considering user surveys in a single space, to collect more reliable observation from the statistical point of view
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