| Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 672, 2025
The 17th ROOMVENT Conference (ROOMVENT 2024)
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 07014 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | Poster Articles: Health, IAQ, Thermal Comfort, Ventilation & Energy Efficiency | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202567207014 | |
| Published online | 05 December 2025 | |
Think global, act local: How well does local thermal climatization align with current thermal comfort standards?
1 Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Building E3D, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
2 International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy – ICIEE, Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering – DTU Sustain, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
* Corresponding author: syndicus@e3d.rwth-aachen.de
Local thermal comfort has attracted increased interest both from research and industry. When heating and cooling efforts are brought closer to an occupant as in the case of a Personalized Environmental Control System (PECS), the two advantages of an improved adaptability to individual preferences and a realization of energy savings are possible to achieve simultaneously. Furthermore, localized sources of discomfort can be alleviated without changes to the whole-room set-point. Yet, local climatization efforts need to be referenced against current thermal comfort standards, either to identify agreement, or to specify the need for standard revisions, if deemed necessary. In addition to this, even though current thermal comfort standards identify and provide limits for local thermal discomfort parameters individually (radiant temperature asymmetry, draught, vertical air temperature difference between head and ankles, and floor surface temperature as described in ISO EN 7730 and ASHRAE Standard 55), the occupants in buildings can be exposed to a combination of these factors simultaneously (e.g., draught and radiant temperature asymmetry from a cold window). While some effects due to local change in room conditions are already considered in these standards (e.g., higher air velocities permitted during elevated air temperatures, performance and assessment criteria for PECS), the interplay of multiple sources of discomfort is not described. Based on these two current and pressing issues, the present opinion paper suggests two development topics to be included in universal thermal comfort standards, namely interaction and combination of local thermal discomfort parameters and the applicability of the existing limits to local climatization (i.e., PECS) systems.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2025
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.

