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To date, religious facilities have received little attention in the published literature regarding energy use and efficiency. With unique operating and building characteristics, these buildings have distinct opportunities for analysis in regards to building energy use and occupant comfort. With overall lower average energy intensity, religious facilities rarely receive energy assessments or are operated by experienced personnel. Therefore, identifying common issues is critical for training church owners in energy efficiency. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and occupant comfort in two religious facilities. The analysis reveals that the largest opportunities for reduction in energy use come from proper maintenance and operation of HVAC equipment and schedules. Temperature setbacks are shown to be an important operational setting to reduce energy usage. An accompanying analysis on thermal comfort reveals that temperature setbacks must be coupled with sufficient preconditioning of the space to ensure occupant comfort during intermittent building occupancy. An analysis of CO 2 levels in the building during occupancy reveals the need for sufficient outside air to meet ventilation standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a review of studies on natural convection heat transfer in the triangular enclosure namely, in attic-shaped space. Much research activity has been devoted to this topic over the last three decades with a view to providing thermal comfort to the occupants in attic-shaped buildings and to minimising the energy costs associated with heating and air-conditioning. Two basic thermal boundary conditions of attic are considered to represent hot and cold climates or day and night time. This paper also reports on a significant number of studies which have been performed recently on other topics related to the attic space, for example, attics subject to localized heating and attics filled with porous media. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Model predictive control (MPC) has been studied in the building science realm for about three decades. However, the following two aspects of the building control have not been studied thoroughly in MPC research. One is the impact of the mixed-mode cooling system on the active heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) energy consumption, and the other is the differences of individual thermal comfort preference and its impact on energy. This paper proposes an occupant-oriented mixed-mode EnergyPlus predictive control system to optimize HVAC energy consumption while meeting the individual thermal comfort preference. A web-based dashboard is implemented in the test-bed building for three months to collect individual thermal comfort preference data. The data analysis results suggest that occupants have various tolerances and preferences about thermal comfort. The simulation results show that, during one week of a typical swing season, the mixed-mode system further reduces the active HVAC energy consumption, and the diversified occupant thermal comfort preference has significant impact on HVAC energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: HVAC energy savings have been a key focus of recent building energy management efforts, but the savings typically reduce thermal comfort for building occupants. Established thermal comfort models use complex and person-specific parameters, such as clothing insulation and metabolic rate, to predict individual comfort levels, making the design of automated comfort modelling systems a highly challenging endeavour. In this paper, we investigate the use of humidex, which encapsulates both temperature and humidity, as an easily measurable and highly representative indoor thermal comfort predictor. We verify the feasibility of humidex as an indoor thermal comfort predictor by contrasting its performance to that of the best feature set (the feature set that best predicts the thermal comfort) constructed jointly by recursive sequential forward selection and support vector regression. The analysis using the global datasets, including data from seven climate zones across three continents, shows that humidex is a favourable and easily measurable indoor thermal comfort descriptor when humidity is significant. We take away the message from the analysis and design, develop, and deploy a system that couples a deployment of sensor nodes in an office environment, where each node collects the ambient temperature and humidity at each person's desk, and an automated survey mechanism to record people's thermal sensation votes. We use subjective response through the surveys as ground truth to validate the performance of the thermal comfort prediction using humidex. The results confirm our analysis of global datasets and show that humidex is a good predictor of indoor thermal comfort at high humidity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]