Alternative Air Conditioning Technologies: Underfloor AirDistribution (UFAD)

Recent trends in today's office environment make it increasingly more difficult for conventional centralized HVAC systems to satisfy the environmental preferences of individual officer workers using the standardized approach of providing a single uniform thermal and ventilation environment. Since its original introduction in West Germany during the 1950s, the open plan office containing modular workstation furniture and partitions is now the norm. Thermostatically controlled zones in open plan offices typically encompass relatively large numbers of workstations in which a diverse work population having a wide range of preferred temperatures must be accommodated. Modern office buildings are also being impacted by a large influx of heat-generating equipment (computers, printers, etc.) whose loads may vary considerably from workstation to workstation. Offices are often reconfigured during the building's lifetime to respond to changing tenant needs, affecting the distribution of within-space loads and the ventilation pathways among and over office partitions. Compounding this problem, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of the comfort, health, and productivity of individual office workers, giving rise to an increased demand among employers and employees for a high-quality work environment. During recent years an increasing amount of attention has been paid to air distribution systems that individually condition the immediate environments of office workers within their workstations to address the issues outlined above. As with task/ambient lighting systems, the controls for the ''task'' components of these systems are partially or entirely decentralized and under the control of the occupants. Typically, the occupant has control over the speed and direction, and in some cases the temperature, of the incoming air supply. Variously called ''task/ambient conditioning,'' ''localized thermal distribution,'' and ''personalized air conditioning'' systems, these systems have been most commonly installed in open-plan office buildings in which they provide supply air and (in some cases) radiant heating directly into workstations. TAC systems can be classified into the following two major categories: (1) furniture-based, and (2) floor-based, underfloor air distribution (UFAD). A large majority of these systems include a raised floor system with which underfloor plenums are used to deliver conditioned air to the space through floor grills, or in conjunction with the workstation furniture and partitions