Relazione tra valutazione soggettiva e oggettiva del benessere termico in alcuni edifici scolastici italiani

To combine all benefits of the rational approach to the thermal comfort assessment with the need to take into account some individual adaptation in non-air conditioned environments, in 2002 Fanger proposed the use of an expectancy factor. This factor, multiplied by the PMV value, returns a corrected vote that fits well the thermal sensation vote attributed by occupants in such a kind of environments. In this paper we propose an expectancy factor value for the Mediterranean climate based on a combined subjective and objective investigation on about 200 Italian classrooms and more than 4000 students both in winter and in summer. All school buildings were non-air conditioned and ventilated by operable windows. The subjective investigation has been carried out by means of a special questionnaire also containing a direct question on the acceptability to verify the agreement between the percentages of dissatisfied consistent with the votes assigned to the thermal environment and the acceptability. Obtained results show similar distributions and exhibit only a slight overestimation of the percentage of dissatisfied under neutrality conditions, in good agreement with other studies.