Experimental Assessment of Thermal Comfort and Ventilation Performance in Buildings

Human comfort has an important role in building design. Thermal conditions and ventilation performance represent two main topics regarding users health and comfort. Several techniques and assessment methods have been proposed during the last few years. However, most of them are complex and expensive and therefore difficult to carry out during building commissioning. The aim of this study is to review and test the existing techniques and methodologies of assessing thermal comfort and ventilation performance in buildings and to look for a simplified methodology in order to evaluate the differences between the results obtained by using the existing techniques and the simplified one. This simplified approach could be useful applied to the calibration process of thermal environment simulations. A campaign of experimental measurements was performed in a case study situated in the campus of the ESTP Paris. In detail, thermal comfort was assessed following the static approach and the PMV index. Furthermore, the intrinsic ventilation performance (air change rate, age of air, air change efficiency) was assessed with tracer gas techniques, using the decreasing concentration method. Finally, an analysis of results was carried out with particular regard for measurement uncertainties due to the quality of the measuring devices