Ubiquitous Monitoring and Adaptation of the Tempered Environment

Recent developments in low-cost, ubiquitous sensing of the built environment offer great potential for improving thermal comfort and reducing building energy consumption. A network of sensors installed during the renovation of a former bottling facility will be used in conjunction with occupant feedback and building automation to enhance thermal comfort while improving building energy efficiency. Adaptive models of thermal comfort such as ASHRAE Standard 55 and its revisions (Nicol and Humphreys in Energy Build 34:563–572, 2002; De Dear and Brager in Energy Build 34:549–561, 2002) characterize thermal comfort in terms of several environmental factors, including air temperature, air velocity, relative humidity, and thermal radiation. While these variables can, in principle, be modeled to any desired fidelity, building energy simulations typically require gross simplifications to address the intractable computational challenges of the Navier-Stokes equations and the radiant heat transfer equation. As a result, air volumes are typically modeled as having uniform properties within a given thermal zone, and each boundary surface is treated as having a uniform temperature. The asymmetries overlooked in such models are the very parameters at the core of many passive and active environmental conditioning strategies. The implications of these exclusions, as well as the performance benefits derived from the provision of this missing data via the deployment of building sensor networks, is the subject that the present study investigates through empirical findings.