Temperature, thermal sensation and workers’ performance in air-conditioned and free-running environments

Abstract

Recently, several empirical relationships of temperature or thermal sensation vote with workers’ performance have been published. All these relationships are based on data concerning air-conditioned environments. It has been empirically established that workers in a free-running, naturally ventilated office environment judge thermal comfort and show adaptive behaviour in a way that is quite different from in an air-conditioned environment. Therefore, the relationships mentioned above cannot be extrapolated to free-running office environments. Field studies into the impact of temperature and thermal sensation on workers’ performance in free-running environments are needed. At this time our expectation is that in free-running environments performance is the highest at the neutral or comfortable temperature and that performance decreases when the temperature deviates from the neutral. Furthermore, we expect performance in free-running environments with the matching comfort temperature to be higher than that in air-conditioned environments with the matching comfort temperature.