In naturally ventilated buildings, occupants play a key role in the performance and energy efficiency of the building operation, mainly through the opening and closing of windows. To include the effects of building occupants within building performance simulation, several useful models describing building occupants and their window opening/closing behaviour have been generated in the past 20 years. However, in these models, the occupants are classified based on the whole population or on sub-groups within a building, whilst the behavioural difference between individuals is commonly ignored. This research project addresses this latter issue by evaluating the importance of the modelling and prediction of occupants window behaviour individually, rather than putting them into a larger population group. The analysis is based on field-measured data collected from a case study building containing a number of single-occupied cellular offices. The study focuses on the final position of windows at the end of the working day. In the survey, 36 offices and their occupants were monitored, with respect to the occupants presence and window use behaviour, in three main periods of a year: summer, winter and transitional. From the behaviour analysis, several non-environmental factors, namely, season, floor level, gender and personal preference, are identified to have a statistically significant effect on the end-of-day window position in the building examined. Using these factors, occupants window behaviour is modelled by three different classification methods of building occupants, namely, whole population, sub-groups and personal preference. The preference-based model is found to perform much better predictive ability on window state when compared with those developed based on whole population and sub-groups. When used in a realistic building simulation problem, the preference-based prediction of window behaviour can reflect well the different energy performance among individual rooms, caused by different window use patterns. This cannot be demonstrated by the other two models. The findings from this research project will help both building designers and building managers to obtain a more accurate prediction of building performance and a better understanding of what is happening in actual buildings. Additionally, if the habits and behavioural preferences of occupants are well understood, this knowledge can be potentially used to increase the efficiency of building operation, by either relocating occupants within the building or by educating them to be more energy efficient.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:594451 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Wei, Shen |
| Publisher | Loughborough University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/14066 |
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