Abstract
Design activity on healthcare buildings cannot be limited to the energy aspects and must account also for the indoor thermal comfort conditions. Indeed, the occupants of this category of buildings are affected by different kinds of unhealthy statuses and particular attention is required in order to ensure conditions adequate to therapies and medical treatments. Even if simulation can be a helpful tool in designing new buildings, also in case of complex clinics and hospitals, a proper calibration is a necessary step for the existing building stock. In this way, discrepancies between simulated and measured building energy performance and thermal behavior can be reduced, improving the reliability of the model itself and allowing its use for many purposes, from the assessment of energy performance to the evaluation of indoor thermal comfort. In this work, experimental and numerical modelling activities have been performed in order to develop a calibrated model of part of a healthcare building in Vienna, Austria, for the assessment of both thermal performances and comfort conditions. The facility was built in the early ‘90s, with later expansions, and is composed of many environments characterized by different therapeutic activities. Many properties of the building envelope and system are unknown and initial values have been assumed from direct inspections and documentation on construction standards. After zoning the healthcare, for each ambient, long-term measurements of the air temperature were recorded every 10 minutes from March to June 2015 and used to calibrate the model. During the same period, occupants were interviewed about their thermal comfort sensations and detailed short-term measurements were collected to calculate Fanger’s Predicted Mean Votes and Percentages of Dissatisfies. The simulated air temperature and internal surface temperature profiles have been used to evaluate the same indexes by comparing them with those calculated from the measured data and people’s votes.