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Thermal comfort studies in India are very much at an emerging stage. According to Indian codes, in the summer, the comfortable temperature range for residential buildings is 23–26 °C. The recommended Indian residential comfort range does not consider the impact of India's enormous cultural and geographical heterogeneity. Additionally, there seems to be very little effort to conduct a thermal comfort field survey in India's rural regions. In recent years, houses in rural India have been converted from kutcha (mud houses) to pucca (concrete houses). This work is aimed at proposing an adaptive thermal comfort model for the premonsoon season in the rural area of Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India. The model was achieved using a field study survey conducted in 80 rural area houses in the months of June and July. Regression analysis, the Griffiths method, and the Fanger method have been adopted to analyze thermal comfort. Based on the regression analysis, the comfort band (voting −1 to +1) is established in the range of 28.39 °C to 32.31 °C, with 30.30 °C as the neutral temperature. The study has been carried out to assess the influence of gender, age, controls, and fan usage on thermal comfort perception in rural households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-phase materials are commonly used in engineering application because of its various properties like strength, thermal conductivity, durability and toughness etc. Effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of two-phase material is the fundamental property to predict its thermal performance. Various geometry (spheres, cylinders, irregular particles) have been considered by researchers for calculating ETC of two-phase materials. Due to complex structure, hollow circular cylinder geometry is not reported yet. In this paper, two-dimensional periodic two-phase system, with hollow circular cylinder shape is considered for calculating ETC. In present work unit cell approach method is used to derive collocated parameters model for estimation of ETC. Hollow circular cylinder model with Ψ = 0.2 gives good result for estimating ETC with average percentage error of 6.46%.

People tend to maintain symmetry between comfort and economy while choosing essential commodities needed in their life. Families buy a house which may offer comfort condition, but at minimum in term expenses of energy throughout a life. Thus, it is most important to erect a house to provide comfortable condition and moderate the lifetime expenditure by saving energy consumption. Sensation of thermal comfort varies from people to people, even in an identical environment. To minimize the consumption of energy of building, cost of consumed energy and to provide a comfortable house, thermal comfort analysis in indoor environments have attracted many researchers. Fanger’s Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) - Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PPD) model is widely accepted theory for assessment of building indoor thermal conditions. In the present work, thermal comfort of an LIG house in Chhattisgarh region of India has been analyzed based on PMV-PPD method for months representing three different seasons in a year i.e. May, September and December representing summer, post monsoon and winter respectively. Cooling, heating and actual energy load of LIG house has been calculated and reported for the above mentioned months. From analysis it is concluded that inhabitants are comfortable only during the winter.