Standard effective temperature based adaptive-rational thermal comfort model

Thermal adaptations mitigate thermal discomfort and thereby reducing building energy consumption. Adaptive-rational thermal comfort modelling modifies the rational model using the adaptive approach to enable the rational model to fully account for the thermal adaptations for improved thermal comfort prediction. However, the applicability of the adaptive-rational thermal comfort modelling has only been verified for the rational model of Predicted Mean Vote. Standard effective temperature (SET) is a more advanced rational model that has been adopted by ASHRAE 55. This study proposes two SET based adaptive-rational thermal comfort models. Predicted thermal sensation (PTS) is obtained from the SET. The PTS is modified by the extension method and adaptive method of the adaptive-rational thermal modelling to be the extended PTS and adaptive PTS respectively. Case studies using field data from naturally-ventilated and air-conditioned buildings validate that, compared with the PTS, the conventional extended PTS and conventional adaptive PTS improve the accuracy in the thermal sensation prediction by 6.6–36.5%, and the proposed extended PTS and proposed adaptive PTS improve the accuracy by 29.4–77.0%. Thus, the proposed extended PTS and proposed adaptive PTS significantly outperform the conventional ones. Besides the improved accuracy, the proposed extended PTS and proposed adaptive PTS are explicitly formulated and convenient for practical applications.