Adaptive comfort: Analysis and application of the main indices

Active climatization is currently one of the main causes of energy use in buildings. Since it aims at providing indoor environmental conditions that are comfortable for most of the building occupants, the way these conditions are determined is very important in the framework of energy optimization. Indoor comfort conditions are conventionally expressed in terms of steady temperature levels (e.g. 20–26 °C). Differently, the adaptive approach determines temperature levels that are unsteady and follow the variability of the outdoor climate. Even if this alternative approach has proven to be very effective in providing mitigated indoor temperatures, agreement about its formulation and its practical application is still lacking. In this paper some of the available formulations of the adaptive approach are described and adopted to determine comfort temperatures for three different Italian climatic contexts. Moreover, the discomfort levels for a case-study room are estimated, by the means of a dynamic building energy simulation model, according to both the conventional and the adaptive approaches.