Review of practices for human thermal comfort in buildings: present and future perspectives

Abstract

Thermal comfort markedly impacts our health, well-being and work productivity. This article is a review of practices generally adopted to quantify human thermal comfort in buildings. The review indicates that there is significant variation in comfort requirements due to diversified socio-cultural set-up and local adaptive behaviour. Thus, the localised thermal comfort models need to be developed to identify the actual comfort requirements helpful in drafting new local comfort standards. The study justifying the relationship between thermal comfort and indoor air quality are scant and need to be explored as such relationships are greatly dependent on occupant’s adaptive behaviour. Further, the interdisciplinary research on thermal comfort which not only helps in real-time assessment but also covers other critical aspects like building architecture and energy consumption is lacking in the literature. Moreover, this review paves way for research on thermal comfort in countries where high building stock is expected in future.

KEYWORDS:

• Human thermal comfort
• thermoregulatory system
• thermal comfort parameters and approaches
• thermal comfort standards
• office and residential buildings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).