Thermal Comfort Zone Representation

Objective

To come up with a range of thermal comfort conditions for your city and identify with one’s own thermal comfort range.

Outcome

Students will understand that thermal comfort is not a fixed entity. It’s range can be varied by enabling thoughtful cooling techniques.

Requirements

Printouts of city specific psychrometric charts for all the students. To be downloaded from: http://www.fairconditioning.org/resources/#149-other-resources-1476600454

Prerequisites

1. A conceptual knowledge of thermal comfort & psychrometry.
2. An understanding of psychrometric chart.

Procedure

Step 1: Take printouts of psychrometric charts of your city for all students and let each carry one chart with yourself.

Step 2: Plot different conditions and temperature on the chart, by changing their locations. Each student should carry out this activity or ideally few to demonstrate the difference of thermal comfort experiences:

Conduct the observations in different points such as:

• Under the sun, peak time
• Peak summer time under the tree
• Under a semi-covered structure
• Beachside, if there is around
• On the road, around highly built environment
• In the park, around few trees
• In a courtyard inside a building
• Inside the room with decent ventilation, poor ventilation and no ventilation

And such different locations and observe two following things: 

1. How do you feel in this location, rate in the level of comfort, On a scale of 1-10 (1 being highly uncomfortable and 10 being highly comfortable)
2. Plot both Dry Bulb Temperature and Relative Humidity on the psychrometry chart. 

Step 3: Identify your own comfortable zone and uncomfortable zone by joining the dots on the psychrometric chart. For eg. If your comfort zone is near to the scientific standards i.e. 98.6°F (37°C), students will be able to experientially identify with that temperature.

Step 4: Share the findings and zones with others, see if there is diversity.

Step 5: Compare the comfort zone with the weather data.

Step 6: Reflect on following points:

• What makes the Thermal comfort dynamic and non-static? How much difference is it for different people in the same city, zone?
• Are our buildings designed according to any thermal comfort range or standards? What are those and how appropriate are those? 

Image

References

Fairconditioning’s thermal Comfort and Indoor Air Quality presentation