Balancing Comfort and Energy Use for Sustainable Buildings: Thermal Comfort Modeling using a Space-variant Manikin

Abstract

To help balance comfort and energy use in residential, institutional and commercial buildings in order to make them more sustainable, a thermal comfort model is coupled with a computational fluid dynamic approach. The developed tool provides an effective tool for demand side management of energy use in buildings. The asymmetrical thermal environment in a university cafeteria building is modeled, and a two dimensional numerical simulation is prepared separately of the thermal sensation in the cafeteria. A finite volume formulation is used to provide the temperature distribution around a space-variant manikin, which is in turn utilized to determine the convective heat transfer coefficients for the simulation of thermal sensation around the manikin.