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Thermal comfort in office buildings is instrumental in improving the productivity of employees while maintaining their health. The primary objectives of this research were to analyze the comfort temperature in Japanese office buildings and investigate its relationship with outdoor air temperature. Additionally, we examined the differences in comfort temperatures with respect to closed and opened windows to factor in the increase in the opening of windows during the COVID-19 pandemic when air-conditioning systems were operated. We investigated the environmental conditions of office buildings and the thermal comfort of the occupants through monthly visits to each office building over a year. Field data were collected from four office buildings located in Nagasaki City, with 1047 votes obtained from 143 participants. The survey indicated that the occupants were highly satisfied with the thermal environment in their offices. The correlation between indoor comfort temperature and outdoor temperature was high in the FR mode. Based on the analysis, we developed an adaptive model for office buildings in Nagasaki City and compared it with existing adaptive models used for buildings in other regions of Japan. The proposed model is useful for energy-saving designs that bring out human adaptive capacity.

This study focuses on the behavioural aspects of the occupants in Japanese office buildings. The behavioural adaptations such as window opening, heating/cooling use, clothing adjustments are important contributor factors for the adaptive thermal comfort. Therefore, understanding the behavioural aspects of the office workers can lead to have the guidelines to explain the mechanism of the adaptive model. The main aim of this study is to identify the differences in behavioural adaptation of the occupants in Japanese office buildings. Environmental parameters such as air temperature, relative humidity, and so on were measured in five mixed-mode office buildings located in Aichi prefecture were analysed for 15 months’ survey with 35 occupants. Thermal comfort survey together with the occupants’ behavioural survey were conducted in these office buildings. An adaptive relationship can be derived to estimate the indoor comfort temperature estimated by Griffiths method from the prevailing outdoor temperature. The results suggest that the proportion of heating and cooling use is related to the outdoor air temperature. The proportion of clothing adjustment is different for the different modes and are correlated to the outdoor air temperature. The acknowledge of the adaptive thermal comfort and the occupant behaviour of the selected buildings will be fruitful in designing the building with maximum thermal comfort in the future.

This study was undertaken to investigate seasonal adaptation to temperature in Japanese offices, with a view to suggesting an adaptive model for them. We measured temperatures in seven office buildings and conducted thermal comfort transverse surveys of occupants for over a year in the Aichi prefecture of Japan. We collected 1,228 samples. The occupants were found to be highly satisfied with the thermal environment in their offices. Even though the Japanese government recommends the indoor temperature of 28 °C for cooling and 20 °C for heating, we found that the comfort temperature was 2.8 °C lower in cooling mode and 4.3 °C higher in heating mode, in line with the actual indoor temperatures. The monthly variation in the temperature in the investigated offices was significantly lower than had been found in dwellings. An adaptive relationship can be derived to estimate the indoor comfort temperature from the prevailing outdoor temperature for similar office buildings.