Thermal Comfort Mapping
Subject
Climatology
,Academic Year
2'nd Year
,Complexity Level
Beginner
,Content tags
Architectural Design
,Space Cooling
,Thermal comfort
,Activity Type
Survey
,Activity duration
1-2 hours
,Objective
To study the effect of orientation and altitude of a room on the thermal comfort conditions inside a building.
Outcome
Students will realise that thermal comfort is not a static, defined entity, but a variable, subjective experience.
Requirements
Sheets of paper, compass.
Prerequisites
A conceptual knowledge of thermal comfort.
Procedure
Step 1: Two students take a tour of the college building to find out the total number of rooms in the building.
Step 2: Create batches from amongst the students such that each batch consists of 2-3 students.
Step 3: Assign 3-4 rooms to a single batch for survey. In this way, all the students in the classroom complete the survey of all the rooms in the building. (the distribution of students and rooms can be varied depending upon the number of students and rooms).
Step 4: After entering the room, students turn off AC’s (if any), open all windows (if closed) & leave fans switched on.
Step 5: They note the orientation of the wall which has the maximum number of windows using a compass.
Step 6: They pass a sheet of paper in the room asking occupants to write a response to the following question: “On a scale of 1-10 (1 being highly uncomfortable and 10 being highly comfortable) how comfortable do you feel?”
Step 7: Once the responses from all the occupants are received, they calculate the mean from these values.
Step 8: At the end, all students come together and consolidate the response sheets, by taking mean values of responses from each room.
Step 9: They compare these values and draw conclusions based on
- Orientation of the classroom.
- Floor number.
Tables
a. Response Sheet
| Orientation of the room: | |
| Floor: | |
| Sr. No. | On a scale of 1-10 (1 being highly uncomfortable and 10 being highly comfortable) how comfortable do you feel? |
| Respondent 1 | |
| Respondent 2 | |
| … | |
| Respondent n | |
| Average |
b. Consolidation Sheet
| Orientation | North | South | East | West | ||||
| Floor / Classroom | Classroom 1 | Classroom 2 | Classroom 1 | Classroom 2 | Classroom 1 | Classroom 2 | Classroom 1 | Classroom 2 |
| 1st Floor | ||||||||
| 2nd Floor | ||||||||
| 3rd Floor | ||||||||
| 4th Floor | ||||||||
References
None