Predicting Thermal Comfort in Mixed-mode Office Building in the UK

Providing a suitable indoor thermal environment in office buildings is necessary for occupants' health and productivity. To date, there is a very limited consensus on how to determine the effect of mixed-mode buildings on occupants' thermal comfort. In this study three issues have been investigated: 1) the impact of the occupants' thermal perceptions in the concurrent type of mixed-mode office buildings; 2) whether the adaptive model would be more accurate than Fanger's PMV model in terms of evaluation thermal comfort in such buildings; 3) the accuracy and applicability of the existing adaptive thermal comfort models for the mixed-mode office buildings. A field study was conducted in an open-plan office in the UK with mixed-mode ventilation. Data were collected in two different periods (Sep. in 2017, Apr. May in 2018). In this study, thermal perceptions of occupants in the office are evaluated using standard comfort survey, together with the measured environmental variables using a variety of sensors simultaneously. Occupants' comfort temperature based on this field data is 25.4 degrees C. The adaptive comfort model is more applicable than PMV-PPD model for such concurrent type of mixed-mode office buildings. Meanwhile, a wider acceptable range is observed and an adaptive comfort model is developed based on this field study in the concurrent type of mixed-mode buildings in the UK.