Critical review and quantitative evaluation of indoor thermal comfort indices and models incorporating solar radiation effects

The solar incidence on an indoor environment and its occupants has significant impacts on indoor thermal comfort; it can bring favorable passive solar heating or can result in undesired overheating (even in winter). With the increasing use of glazing in modern buildings, this problem has become more critical for both building design and energy use. Conventional indoor thermal comfort indictors and models, such as the predictive mean vote and adaptive comfort models, do not consider solar effects and thus under-estimate the actual indoor thermal conditions of environments with solar impacts. This study comprehensively reviewed eight existing models considering solar incidence and proposed one new model for comparison. The prediction performances of these models were quantitively evaluated against each other and against an experiment conducted in this research. The results indicate that most of the models integrating solar radiation as a component in the mean radiation temperature can provide relatively reasonable comfort predictions. The proposed new model presents a similar prediction performance, but it only requires a few easy-to-measure environmental parameters (i.e., solar radiation intensity and room air temperature). This study further demonstrates the potential application of the proposed model. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.