Influence of Sensing Infrastructure Resolution and Comfort Models Integration on the Thermal Comfort Evaluation of an Office Space

The building decarbonization challenge, demanding increasing energy efficiency while ensuring occupant wellbeing, requires to intelligently control building systems. The direct and indirect, by means of measurements and simulation, evaluation of Indoor Environmental Quality could aid operational decisions. This can be done with physical measurements in field with lab-grade data acquisition systems (DAQs) with high accuracy, or with low-cost non-intrusive IoT sensors, which may sacrifice the measurement accuracy. Also, incorporating comfort simulation models can increase spatial and time resolution while reducing costs and invasiveness. This study investigates how different DAQs accuracies and data availability affect the evaluation of thermal comfort in: i) real time monitoring; ii) long-term evaluation. Moreover it is evaluated whether the introduction of numerical models might compensate for data unavailability. The study involved a 30-day experimental campaign in a South-West oriented enclosed office equipped with advanced envelope components and an extensive measurement infrastructure. Thermal comfort was investigated in a short- and long-term evaluation, showing how using non-intrusive sensors integrated with numerical models could lead to a deviation of less than 5% from the reference for Operative temperature and summer PMV estimation.