Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBPThe proposal made by Fraunhofer IBP to revise the profiles (Thermal Comfort in Winter and Summer 3.1.1. and 3.1.2. in the "Assessment System for Sustainable Building for Federal Buildings in Germany " - BNB) calls for more transparent and more quantitative assessments than the existing profiles. Current building simulation programs offer hardly any possibilities for evaluating thermal comfort quicky and systematically. The "BNB Tool Thermal Comfort" with a user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) was therefore developed as a simple method for assessing thermal comfort in rooms or buildings, either on site or on the basis of building simulation data.
What does the tool do?
The tool can be used to analyse the frequency distribution of temperatures in winter and summer, if required only during operating hours or without considering weekends. The tool calculates draught risks (DR), asymmetric radiation temperatures and mean radiation temperatures. The humidity of the air in rooms is estimated dynamically by entering the room volume, moisture production, air exchange rate and humidity recovery rate. The tool calculates the humidity level in rooms based on a pure moisture mass balance, which differs from a detailed simulation of humidity that takes moisture buffering into account. Once all the data has been entered, calculated and evaluated, the tool assigns the points by linear interpolation in accordance with the Fraunhofer IBP recommendations. The output file (xml format) can be viewed in a web browser and saved as a pdf file if required. Both the BNB assessments and the tool's output are based on Fraunhofer IBP's recommendations for existing profiles.
In addition to the BNB assessment, the tool offers a practical PMV-PPD calculation, as well as an inverse calculation of the PMV for determining an unknown parameter (e.g. operative temperature) in order to obtain a specific PMV value.