Assessment of thermal comfort and indoor air quality in the intelligent building – A case study.

Proper indoor air quality and thermal comfort are part of the healthy indoor environment. The tests performed in the public utility, intelligent building „Energies" of Kielce University of Technology (Poland) with a group of students are the focus of the paper. The anonymous questionnaire survey was used to determine their thermal sensations, preferences and acceptability before the lecture and after it. In the meantime CO₂ level, air and globe temperatures, relative humidity and air velocity were measured with the Testo 400 microclimate meter. The comparison of the changing air parameters throughout the time of 1.2h with the questionnaire survey provides information on the possibility of providing high thermal comfort and indoor air quality in the intelligent buildings, which are still quite rare in Central Europe. Consequently, obtaining experimental data there is valuable and important. It turned out that the building did not provide good quality parameters during the study, because the people felt too warm or hot in the room and wanted to change the temperature to a much cooler environment. What is more, the assessment of air quality according to the students at the beginning of classes at relatively low CO₂ contents turns out to be an interesting phenomenon, where 36% of students subjectively assessed it in their questionnaires as being unacceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]