Assessing the impact of thermal comfort models based on physiological parameters of human body on the calculation of heating and cooling demands of indoor spaces

Indoor thermal comfort represents a key aspect for building energy consumption. Besides, the current normative regarding thermal comfort still adopts a static approach without considering the natural adaptability of the human body. The implementation of HVAC system control logics based on a static approach leads to erroneous evaluation of thermal comfort condition overestimating the building energy requirements. To overcome these issues, increasing interest in physiological thermal comfort models to be adopted in building energy simulation tools, allowing to consider physiological features (e.g. skin temperature, heart rate variability, etc.) is detected. Thus, in the present work a novel dynamic simulation model for the human body thermal behavior assessment, implementing variable physical parameters (including conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation, breathing and heat generation), and developed in MatLab environment, is presented. Specifically, the novel developed dynamic simulation model is implemented in an in-house building energy performance simulation tool (called DETECt 2.4). By the novel developed tool, space heating and cooling needs are calculated by correlating the thermal sensation to physical and biological aspects of the human body. Specifically, heart rate and skin temperature are considered as input of the model and are adopted for suitably characterizing the occupants’ thermal sensation