Comfort and Health in Buildings

This course is a part of Buildings as Sustainable Energy Systems, a 4-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

Even in the well-accepted indoor temperature range of 20-24°C (68-75°F), people can experience thermal discomfort. Complaints about the indoor thermal environment are one of the major complaints building and facility managers have to deal with, and they spend a large amount of their time and money to solve them. People spend more than 80% of their time in buildings. Therefore a good thermal comfort and quality of the indoor environment are essential for their wellbeing, health and productivity.

In this course you will learn how to ensure good indoor thermal comfort and air quality, and how these factors relate to building design and to buildings’ energy systems. Comfort complaints mean user dissatisfaction, which in turn means delays and resistance to accept technologies needed for low carbon emission buildings. So if you want to discover what to pay attention to in your energy designs, or in designing new concepts for sustainable buildings, this course is for you.

First you will discover the two main theories of thermal comfort, learning which measurable physical parameters and combinations of parameters impact people’s comfort. Second, you will understand why it is so difficult to create indoor environments satisfying everyone and which main parameters to tune to make buildings comfortable. Third, you will discover how to measure, analyze and solve existing comfort complaints, and finally you will find out what determines a healthy indoor air quality.

This course is part of the PCP Buildings as Sustainable Energy Systems. In the other courses in this program you can learn how to design buildings with low energy demand, how to choose low carbon energy supply, and how to control and optimize HVAC systems.

The development of this course is supported by Climate-KIC.

What you'll learn

• What the determinant factors of thermal comfort and indoor air quality are.
• How Fanger’s theory and the adaptive comfort theory work, and what recent developments are in this domain.
• How to take thermal comfort into account in the design of buildings, components and energy systems.
• How to measure and analyze actual thermal comfort in buildings and to relate it to comfort complaints.
• What are the determinant factors of healthy indoor environments.