The Impact Of Regional And Seasonal Climate Changes On Human Thermal Adaptability And Its Application

Current field studies on thermal comfort focus on certain rules human formed in adapting to typical climate zones and seasons.What received less concern are the changes of rules and their impacts on the evaluation of indoor thermal environment,as a result of migration between different climate zones and adaptability of seasonal climatic shift.Adaptive thermal comfort in building energy efficiency is applied to set an appropriate operating temperature for HVAC system,and to outline the range of passive controlling in the light of architecture climatic design strategies.In-depth studies have been done in the former aspect,while the accurate evaluation and quantification of energy efficiency in architectural climatic design remain a question.To solve the problems,this paper conducted systemic field investigation and test,and analyzed the impacts of regional and seasonal climate changes on adaptive thermal comfort as well as the evaluation of indoor thermal environment.With the guidance of climatic design principles,it puts forward a new method to evaluate building energy efficiency based on adaptive thermal comfort.The research tasks and findings are as follows:Firstly,plenty of field studies were conducted among northerners,southerners and southerners living in the north for years in China respectively.The result indicates that the overall thermal sensation and neutral temperature of seasoned southerners in the north are not influenced by regional climate changes,but their acceptable temperature range,humidity sensation,behavioral and psychological adaptation tend to go with northerners;Meanwhile,their adaptive comfort model and comfort zone are shifted or narrowed.These facts prove a degree of changes of adaptive thermal comfort under the impact of regional climate changes.Secondly,extended fieldwork in four distinctive seasons of a typical city suggests seasonal differences in human thermal sensation,acceptable temperature range,humidity sensation,behavioral and psychological adaptation,etc.Taken into consideration of the typical climatic features of seasons and the dynamic changes of seasonal climate,namely,the previous season influences the neutral temperature,the range of acceptable temperature and preference temperature of the following one in spring and autumn,we constructed the seasonal adaptive models and comfort zones to reflect the dynamic climate change accurately.Finally,analysis of the impact of adaptability on indoor thermal environment among regional and seasonal climatic changes highlights the necessity to screen subject samples and to avoid evaluation in spring and autumn.Since existing evaluative method of building energy efficiency fails to assess solely the energy-saving effects in terms of building passive design,there is a need to put forward a brand-new method to evaluate the energy efficiency of passive design on adaptive thermal comfort via a new energy consumption evaluating index and calculating principle,which is proved to be able to overcome the defects and limitations of the current building energy efficiency evaluation method.This paper lays the foundation for explaining the mechanism of human climatic adaptability thoroughly,and develops a new vision in the application of adaptive thermal comfort research in building energy efficiency.