In order to investigate the thermal comfort, quality of sleep and behaviour of the occupants of Japanese bedrooms in the hot and humid season, we have measured the air temperature and relative humidity in the 26 bedrooms of 10 houses, and conducted a thermal comfort, depth of sleep and occupant behaviour survey with 31 residents, obtaining 1176 votes. The mean indoor air temperature in the rooms during the survey period was 26.3-27.9°C. The residents sleep in the bedrooms, where the indoor air temperature is high. The mean comfort temperature is 26.4-27.1°C. The thermal comfort of residents is high and the depth of sleep is normal for the given thermal environment. The results showed that residents are thermally satisfied and slept well in the bedrooms using various thermal adjustments, such as cooling, fans, windows and clothing insulation.
After massive earthquake 2015, thousands of Nepalese who lost their permanent houses by the hardest hits were forced to live in makeshift temporary shelters. The people residing in these shelters are facing extreme coldness that causes various health-related problems in winter. The field measurement on indoor thermal environment was conducted in one of the district hit by massive earthquake, Lalitpur. The indoor and outdoor air temperatures of five shelters were measured by a set of thermometers with digital data loggers at the ten minute intervals in winter. The mean indoor and mean outdoor air temperatures during the measured night-time were found to be from 10.3°C and 7.6°C; they were lower than lower limit value of acceptable indoor temperature at 11°C found from our previous research. We analyzed the thermal characteristics of those shelters measured for seeking whether the improvement is possible or not and also how much of it is affordable. Thus, in this study, we evaluated the indoor thermal environment by estimating the heat-transmission characteristics of the used materials in these investigated shelters. The total heat loss coefficient estimated in five shelters per respective floor areas ranged from 11.2 to 15.4 W/(m2·K). These values obtained are very large due to low thermal insulation materials used. The paper ends with important lesson that reduce the total heat loss coefficient needs to reduce down to 2∼7 W/(m2·K) for realising the need to indoor air temperature above at 11°C could be 70% of nighttime hours. Such reduction of heat loss was found to be realized by adding affordable materials, i.e. cellular polyethylene foam and clothes for respective walls and roof.
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