Study On Thermal Comfort And Energy Consumption With Radiant Panel Workstation

People's life and health are closely related to the indoor environment,and the issue about comfort of indoor environment has been attracted the attention of many people.To create a good comfort environment,a large amount of energy is needed.However,researches showed that people would still feel uncomfortable even if the air conditioning system consumed a lot of energy.The problem of saving energy while the comfort of the human was improved has aroused the interest of many researchers.But the analysis of the comfort and energy consumption under the combination of the radiation cooling and the task air conditioning is still not clear.The purpose of this paper is to study the comfort of human and the energy consumption in the hot-humid environment with radiant panel workstation.In this paper,the experiment was carried out to study the comfort and energy consumption of the radiant panel workstation.In total 24 subjects(12 males and 12females)participated in the experimental study and all participants were undergraduate or graduate students.The experiment was divided into experimental and control group.In the control group,the other conditions were the same as that of the experimental group except the radiant panel workstation was closed.In the process of experiment,subjects were asked to stay in a preparation room firstly where the air temperature was kept in a moderate level for 20 min.Then they entered the experimental room and remain seated for 40 min.The subjects' feelings,preferences and acceptability of temperature,wind,humidity and so on were investigated by filling out questionnaires.The indoor and outdoor environment parameters and the radiant plate temperature were collected by various instruments.In this paper,the differences of comfort of the subjects between the traditional convection air conditioning environment and the radiant panel workstation environment were compared with the statistical method.In addition,the energy consumption in the traditional air conditioning environment was simulated,and a simple comparative analysis was made with radiant panel workstation.The obtained results indicate that the subjects with radiant panel workstation were able to remain comfortable,although the background parameters were beyond the comfort range.That is to say,the average vote of thermal sensation at 28 ? was about +0.2,and subjects could maintain comfortable condition well with radiant panelworkstation(within the 80% acceptable range of ASHRAE Standard)although indoor environment was as high as 30 ?.The experimental results also showed that the perceived air quality of subjects were better under lower ambient temperature and the improvement of perceived air quality of subjects with radiant panel workstation were not obvious.The radiant panel workstation can effectively broaden the indoor comfort range in summer and has great energy saving potential.In hot-humid environment,radiant panel workstation effectively improved the comfort of subjects,which may be due to the direct contact between subjects and desktop radiant panels,thereby effectively reducing thermal sensation.The use of radiant workstation is an effective way to reduce energy consumption,but we only made an experimental research on the combination of the desktop radiant panel and the upper radiant panel in summer.Further studies were needed to research the effect of the combination of other radiant plates,the effect of the winter conditions,the optimal combination of the radiant plate,and so on.