COMPUTING OUTDOOR COMFORT BASED ON CBE THERMAL COMFORT CALCULATION FOR ASHRAE-55

As the significance of accurate evaluation of the outdoor thermal environment becomes increasingly apparent, demand by designers in different fields of study has increased and new methods are evolving for producing precise analysis of user comfort levels in the outdoor space. The proposed method in this paper provides a new approach to improve analyzing outdoor comfort conditions by overlaying all the climatic and thermo-physiological data to the context. The accuracy of the analysis of the effect of certain factors on environmental conditions and human thermophysiology is attributed to a digital tool that examine multi-nodes within a single context to evaluate the corresponding human comfort levels at each point against all the input data. Such a process results in a concise and useful decision making process that can be implemented early on in the design process. This paper relates corresponding data to the site, climate, human thermophysiology aspects that are all necessary for each node on the model to be analyzed within its context via a series of specific computational algorithms. The collected data is statistically refined and integrated according to the CBE thermal comfort calculation for ASHRAE-55. The simulations derived from overlaying input data not only allow for the whole site to be analyzed at same time, but also provide visualized data in a simple and legible form to simply depict the complexity. In this regard, adjusting input parameters results in multiple simulations in accordance with the desired outcomes. Then, from the simulation process, a variety of results can be undertaken that provide a platform for comparative studies and ultimately the optimization of the design. Thus the efficiency and effectiveness of a design process that is focused on environmental comfort will be improved.