An Analysis of the Effect of the Building Envelope on Thermal Comfort using the EnergyPlus Program

The scope of this study is to evaluate and compare the effect of exterior surface temperatures on the thermal comfort of a person. This study compares of thermal comfort predictions with the two types of approximate mean radiant temperature (MRT) calculations—“zone averaged ” and “surface weighted”—using the EnergyPlus program. Due to the temperature differences between a standard MRT and individual surface temperatures, thermal comfort sensations will change according to the relative location of people within a space. The introduction of zone averaged and surface weighted MRT will be helpful in the accurate prediction of thermal comfort sensations without details information about the location of surfaces or people. This paper examines the three different case studies (residence, office, and gymnasium) using both the zone averaged and surface weighted MRT for three established thermal comfort models: the Fanger, the Pierce two-node, and the KSU two-node models. This paper shows that it is possible to obtain approximate differences in thermal comfort indices based on zone averaged and surface weighted MRT using the EnergyPlus program