Numerical and Experimental Investigation of the Thermal Comfort of an Office Building Equipped with Hybrid Downdraft Evaporative Cooler

Abstract

In office buildings, provision of thermal comfort for occupant’s high intellectual concentration, efficiency and productivity is imperative. This study experimentally and numerically investigates the thermal comfort performance of HDEC system equipped to an office building. The experiment was carried out in September, October and November for 24 working days and the thermal comfort Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) index being the objective function was determined using Centre for Built Environment thermal comfort tool. DesignBuilder CFD simulation software was employed to numerically determine the PMV index of the test office using ASHRAE Standard-55 thermal comfort range of PMV=±0.5. Minitab 19 software was used to validate the numerical results against the experimental results. The Pearson correlation coefficient and the P-value at 95% confidence level were 0.717 and 0.00 respectively while the RMSE computed was 0.653 indicating a good agreement between the numerical and the experimental results. Both PMV results indicate that the HDEC system is suitable for the provision of thermal comfort in office buildings and any other similar building.