Experimental assessment of a satisfaction based thermal comfort control for a group of occupants

The set point of the Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system is usually given by the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model. However, the individual differences in thermal preference often incur dissatisfactions in a group, which indicates that the PMV model may have bias in predicting the thermal comfort for a group of occupants. It has great potential to find a more suitable model to determine room set points. In this paper, a satisfaction based group comfort model is developed based on our previous work. We build an individual comfort model for each person according to their satisfaction and take the convex hull of these comfort zones. Some experiments are implemented for the group under both cooling and heating conditions in an ordinary office environment. The experimental results including indoor environment control, users' acceptance, working efficiency and energy consumption are supporting the presented group model.