The Investigation Of Thermal Comfort And Window-opening Behaviour In Office Building During The Summer Season Of Hot Summer/Cold Winter Region

As human being and productivity are strongly affected by the built environment, providing comfortable indoor conditions is an important part of building design. Thermal comfort can surely be achieved with operating the environment system by the occupants includes opening windows and doors, adjusting curtains, switching lights, controlling the heating, cooling, ventilating equipment .etc. Indeed field investigations have indicated that the different energy consumption of identical buildings were mainly due to the behaviour of the occupants. Therefore, to make an understanding of the environment control by the occupants is significant.This paper first presented the background, significance and main job of this research, and the current research status of thermal comfort and window-opening behaviour were reviewed. However, there was no research on window-opening behaviour in China. Moreover, the paper presented the development of a counting device of window-opening. This device can use to monitor occupant patterns and window-opening status.A field study of thermal comfort and window-opening behaviour was carried out in an office building in an university for three months. There were 18 occupants from 5 offices participated in this study and 944 questionnaire responses were collected. Both the field measurement and questionnaires were adopted in this study.Moreover, the paper presented the definition and influencing factors of thermal comfort. Based on the results of objective measurements, subjective measurements and window-opening measurements, the paper analysed different effects in ventilated offices and air-conditioned offices. According to the monitoring data, the relationship between window-opening behaviour and indoor and outdoor temperature was statistically significant.Finally, the statistical package SPSS Version 14 was used in the study and the Binary Logistic regression analysis has been used to formulate an adaptive algorithm to predict the likelihood that windows are open. Through the analysis of the survey data, we got the window-opening models of naturally ventilated offices and air-conditioned offices in the hot summer and cold winter region in China, which could be helpful for building designers to design more comfortable and energy efficient buildings. These models could aslo be used in the research on indoor air quality, naturally ventilated and thermal comfort .etc.