Evaluation of indoor environmental conditions in university classrooms

Abstract

Analysing learning environments is important because classrooms can affect students’ well-being and learning performance. In this paper, a field study was conducted based on a mixed method for a better understanding of indoor environmental conditions in six buildings of Balikesir University in Turkey. The perceptions of students were combined with measurements and surveys. The environmental parameters such as indoor and outdoor air temperature, indoor black globe temperature, indoor and outdoor relative humidity, indoor carbon dioxide concentration and air velocity were measured. A total of 1782 responses from students were also obtained. The recorded values of mean indoor air temperature, relative humidity, black globe temperature and air velocity were 23·4°C, 39·8%, 22·9°C and 0·09 m/s, respectively. Carbon dioxide concentrations usually exceeded the threshold of 1000 ppm. Over 55% of students said they found indoor conditions thermally acceptable in all classrooms during the field study. The mean neutral temperatures, as predicted by actual and predicted mean values, were 21·7 and 23·1°C. Indoor measured temperatures were mostly found to be higher than neutral temperatures. The findings can be used for the design and evaluation of indoor conditions and heating systems in university buildings.

Campus City Project: Challenge Living Lab for Smart Cities

“…The main aspects that influence air quality are vehicle traffic, fuel burning, industries [47,49,50], and the low performance of air conditioning systems (HVAC) [51]. Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from indoor air is one of the critical factors in determining IAQ [47,[52][53][54][55].…”

“…However, not enough attention has been paid to school buildings [58]. A classroom is a tight space with several people inside, therefore, the air quality can deteriorate over time [50]. Students comfort, health and productivity (learning efficiency and attention during classes) could be dependent of the IAQ.…”

Measuring the Lighting Quality in Academic Institutions: The UPM Faculty of Aerospace Engineering (Spain)

“…The importance of proper lighting conditions (i.e., visual comfort) at academic institutions has been emphasized at all levels, from elementary, primary, and secondary education schools [1][2][3][4][5][6] to university faculties [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In general, it can be said that comfort in academic environments has been widely analyzed as it has important effects on learning.…”

“…After them, other less relevant aspects such as wall colors, furniture, spatial arrangements, ventilation, etc. can also be added when analyzing the aforementioned comfort in academic institutions [4,10,12,13,15]. Visual comfort mainly depends on lighting.…”

“…Some of these focused mainly on energy costs and efficiency [18,20,21,23], as lighting represents about 20% of the world's demand for electrical energy production [23]. On the other hand, many analyses on visual comfort and the effects of lighting seem to be based on surveys/interviews rather than measuring the illuminance levels [5,6,11,12,15]. Even those works that reflect lighting measurements include surveys [13,16,24,25], adding subjective (and statistical) factors to the study.…”