Thermal Adatation In Mix-mode Buildings In Hot-humid Area Of China

The adaptive approach to modeling thermal comfort acknowledges that the person is no longer simply a passive recipient of the given thermal environment, but instead an active agent interacting with and adjusting to the person-environment system via multiple feedback loops. More and more recent studies discovered various interactions between people and their built environments in behavior, psychological or physiological ways. To understand the mechanism of human adaptation in built environment is helpful for the developments of the new building designs and technologies to fully inspire human adaptations.Taking the people from mix-mode buildings of hot-humid area of China as an example, the present study is to obtain their thermal adaptive characteristics by combining field and climate chamber study, which will establish a base for built environmental design and evaluation in hot-humid area. Totally 30 healthy subjects in college age were recruited, who were born and grown up in the Zhujiang Delta and have lived in the mix-mode buildings in the recent 3 years, and a-year-long field study and summer and winter climate chamber studies were conducted.The environmental variations of the mix-mode buildings were obtained by the field study. A good linear relation between thermal sensation and SET was found and the neutral temperature in SET was 24.89℃. The 80% acceptable temperature range was 20.7~30.2℃and the adaptive behaviors were found to be related closely with ET*.A two-order polynomial relationship between mean skin temperature and SET was found by the climate chamber studies. Thermal sensation changed closely with mean skin temperature. Thermal comfort was closely correlated to skin wettedness in warm environment and heart rate speeded up with the increase of standard effective temperature.Comparisons of the results from the field study and climate chamber studies in different seasons provided the evidences for seasonal adaptations. Comparisons between the results obtained in the present study and those in the previous study with the subjects from naturally ventilated buildings indicated the psychological and physiological effects of long-term thermal history.