SpencerMayes
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Thermal Comfort and Wellbeing
The thermal comfort of an occupant can affect his or her wellbeing in a number of ways and I will go through some of them here; however first I will describe thermal comfort and how to quantify it.
The thermal comfort of a person is described as “that condition of mind that expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment and is assessed by subjective evaluation”. The thermal comfort of an individual is personal and varies greatly from person to person. The subjective evaluation usually suggests a survey is needed to get the personal input from each of the occupants of a building. The large range of conditions and number of people required to give proper averages make this impractical in the majority of cases and cannot be done pre-occupation. A different approach consists of measuring environmental conditions and then calculating the thermal comfort indices, which relate to the measured values and calculated indices as if a range of people were surveyed.
The standards BS EN ISO 7730 and ASHRAE 55 give methods for taking the environmental measurements and subsequent calculations to give quantified numbers to compare thermal comfort between buildings and different conditions within the same building. The measured values required by the standard are air speed, turbulence intensity (using the standard deviation of air speed), air temperature, black globe temperature/operative temperature and relative humidity.
Read more at https://www.bsria.co.uk/news/article/thermal-comfort-and-wellbeing/