Selecting and testing Personal Comfort Systems (PCS) in office spaces in a Mediterranean climate: First insights from in-situ surveys

Personal Comfort Systems (PCS) can provide a quick and effective way to ensure thermal comfort for people inside buildings. This hypothesis can be duly tested in the case of office buildings, where workers spend most of their daily time in indoor conditions that can negatively impact on their health, work productivity, learning performance, and well-being. The Comfort for All (COM4ALL) research project aims to demonstrate how it is possible to improve users' comfort in office buildings while reducing energy expenditures for heating and cooling spaces through a detailed understanding of individuals' personal comfort responses and the concomitant use of PCS. This paper presents the preliminary results obtained by the project by first discussing the process of selecting and testing a series of commercially-available PCS in terms of acceptability from the users and energy expenditure. Then, their potential integration in both single and shared office spaces is presented for a case study building located in the Mediterranean city of Catania (Italy), where indoor layouts, thermal conditions and HVAC systems are characterized through an experimental campaign. Preliminary results show that PCS could effectively be used for improving an individual's comfort sensation in both individual and shared spaces without negatively affecting surrounding people and at a very small power: from a negligible 1.2 W of a tower fan at the lowest air velocity up to 150 W for a heated keyboard at the highest temperature of 52°C. These figures, determined through an experimental characterization of various PCS under different operating conditions, are actually lower than those reported by the manufacturers in their datasheets. Based on these first outcomes, activities are ongoing to monitor different office spaces and test various PCS during an entire year in order to estimate the potential energy savings.