PERSONAL THERMAL COMFORT SYSTEMS: A REVIEW ON CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS, LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Abstract

The building automation system industry is conservatively functioned to sustain homogeneous indoor ambient conditions to provide a comfortable thermal environment for all occupants. However, maintaining these conditions throughout the buildings causes unnecessary energy consumption and does not actually address the varying thermal comfort needs of an individual. Personal differences based on physiological and psychological aspects makes it difficult to address the comfort needs of all building occupants using centralized conditioning. Therefore, various personal thermal comfort systems (PCS) were studied to provide personal conditioning in a shared space.

To discover the research gap and potential future work for the PCS, the standard and requirement of a PCS is discussed. A systematic review of the individual PCS involving human subjects’ experiment will also be investigated and discussed. The discussion is based upon the performance of individual PCS, limitations and future directions identified in the table of studies.

From the studies, it was discovered that several components of the PCS were still lacking in research, namely comfort transient, extreme environmental condition and the integration of PCS into the real world. On this basis, future studies should consider appraising PCS in actual office building to test the functionality and efficiency in providing personalized conditioning.