Comfort models and cooling of buildings in the Mediterranean zone

In the presence of renewed research and application efforts towards low- or zero-energy buildings, the issues of fine-tuning comfort and fully understanding its connection with energy use are becoming increasingly relevant both for research and application, and particularly so in the Mediterranean zone. This chapter discusses how the evolution of knowledge about comfort and its incorporation into international standards, inter alia in the form of comfort categories for different types of buildings, can influence the design, operation and evaluation of buildings in the Mediterranean area. There is a discussion of some of the implications, obtained by the authors via dynamic simulation software complemented by pre- and post-processing tools specifically prepared to ameliorate and speed the treatment of comfort data. The authors present an optimization methodology, some results in a selection of climates, and the current limitations and needs for improvement of the indexes defined in the standards. Critical analysis and results presented here have been developed partially under the IEE projects Commoncense and ThermCo.