Performance Comparison for Thermal Comfort Sensors

Abstract

During the past several years, indoor environmental quality has become an important concern for many corporations and building owners. As a result, architects and engineers are being asked to provide building systems that are responsive to the demands for high-quality interior spaces. One of the most important issues associated with indoor environmental quality is thermal comfort. It is generally accepted that thermal comfort plays an important role in worker productivity. As a result, some thermal system controls manufacturers have developed new sensors that include multiple sensing elements such as air temperature, velocity, and relative humidity, as well as radiant temperature. These sensors are intended to improve the controllability of spaces when compared to standard thermostats, but often at a considerably higher cost. The performance of these new sensors relative to that of the typical room thermostat has not been well documented. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to describe the results of a research project that compares the response of a standard temperature transmitter to that of selected new thermal comfort sensors for a range of indoor conditions. The comparisons are made under controlled experimental conditions using predicted mean vote as an indicator of thermal comfort. Results are presented using various statistical analysis techniques. The results suggest that the new sensors generally perform better than the test temperature transmitter, but the improved performance is not statistically significant.