Comfort Levels for Office Environment Users

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study consists of verifying the efficiency of building façade materials and natural ventilation systems to control internal temperature in the office buildings of the city of Sao Paulo. It is assumed that such systems must achieve office environment users ' standard comfort levels to be considered efficient, as well as maintain a reasonable relation between cost of implementation / performance, contribute to energy consumption reduction by minimizing the use of artificial air cooling systems and be easily operated by users and/or autonomous systems. For that, heat changes between building envelope, external environment and heating produced by internal environment occupants and/or equipment investigations were carried out with the objective of verifying in which period of the year optimum comfort levels can be reached through the means of natural ventilation, mechanical ventilation or cooling systems and how much energy has to be consumed with each alternative. Moreover, it pointed out how passive technologies can contribute to decreasing energy consumption in such circumstances. This approach has to also take into consideration data about air quality, in order to check diverse elements concerned to user comfort levels. This analysis evaluated different elements of building envelopes, such as window-wall ratio and components ’ thermal characteristics, in addition to different types of office floor programs and areas