Determination of Parameters Influencing Thermal Comfort in a Building

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical and an experimental study on the determination of thermal phase shift time and damping factors of building walls. The work consisted in evaluating the thermal comfort in a building. This study is a contribution to put in place a thermal regulation in Burkina Faso, a country with a dry tropical climate. This regulation will, in its application, reduce the energy consumption related to air conditioning in buildings. To do this, we theoretically determine the parameters influencing this comfort using the admittance method. This method makes it possible to analyze the thermal response of a building to a periodic energy demand. It is based on the modeling of the building component by the quadrupole method resulting from the writing of the thermal problem in the form of transfer matrix products. The principle is to link the flows and temperatures of both sides of a homogeneous wall through the equation of heat and the Fourier transform. The calculation method is validated by experimental results. For simple sheet walls based on their compositions, damping factors range from about 37.9% to 79.7% and thermal phase shift time from about 3.9 hours to 7.4 hours. However, the values of these parameters are better when the walls are double-sheeted, the maximum value of the damping factor is 11.5% and the minimum value of the thermal phase shift time is 9.7 h. The values of Mean Bias Difference (MBD) and Root Mean Square Difference (RMSD) show that the theoretical and experimental results are quite concordant. The admittance method can be used to evaluate the performance of building walls.

Thermal Monitoring and Simulation of Earthen Buildings. A Review

“…Ouedraogo [37] validates the model and presents the errors MBD and RMSD calculated for the decrement factor and the thermal lag. He obtained a correlation for the decrement factor of less than 2.5% for the MBD and less than 10% for the RMSD, for all the prototypes tested (earth, earth with paper and earth with paper and cement), and a correlation of about 5.6% and 9.3% for the MBD and RMSD respectively, for the thermal lag.…”

“…Ouedraogo [37] analysed the thermal phase shift time and the damping factors of building walls to assess thermal comfort in a building located in Burkina Faso, a country with a hot semi-arid climate (BSh). In his study, Ouedraogo analysed the combination of earth with other materials like paper or cement, for constructing the compressed earth blocks (CEB).…”

“…The same authors that monitored the compressed earth blocks dwellings in Ecuador and Burkina Faso, Miño et al [36] and Ouedraogo [37] respectively, also simulated the behaviour of the construction in order to assess the thermal comfort and validate the model with the experimentation.…”

“…Three authors propose wall thickness of 14 cm. The base ventilation ratio set up goes from 0.35 to 0.5 ACH and the monitoring results have been used to validate the simulated model in two studies [36,37]. Decrement factor and thermal lag parameters are only presented by [76].…”

Energy Efficiency through the Implementation of an AI Model to Predict Room Occupancy Based on Thermal Comfort Parameters

“…As early as 1932, evidence shows environmental factors' importance in assessing users' comfort [42]. Thermal comfort is generally captured by measurements of four parameters: dry-bulb temperature, relative humidity, airspeed, and radiant temperature [43]. The plotting of these variables on graph results in a psychometric chart that enables designers to calculate the optimum area for designing comfortable and healthy indoor spaces [44].…”