Thermal indoor climate as a building performance: Proposal for new criteria, design aids and assessment methods in the Netherlands

Abstract

The thermal indoor climate is one of the main characteristic performances of a building. The indoor climate should optimally support the activities of the people within the building. This chapter proposes a new Dutch guideline for thermal comfort performance of indoor spaces. The comfort criterion for occupant controlled building spaces is less severe than the criterion for centrally controlled indoor climate, and also less severe than the existing criteria given by the Dutch Government Buildings Agency (GBA) for both occupant controlled, and centrally controlled buildings. To assess the performance of a building with respect to the thermal indoor climate the response of the building to the outdoor climate of a whole year is considered. In designing new buildings this is common practice and the use of thermal simulation computer models is wide spread. Work is to be done on an instrument that can directly assess buildings, based on measurements of indoor and outside temperatures during a limited period of time. Once the indoor climate quality during a shorter period will be related to the indoor climate for the whole year for different building prototypes and for a number of outdoor climate prototypes during one or two weeks, this should be possible. This relation may be found by means of large number of computer simulation calculations.