Comfort Models and Building design 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 mostly so in the Mediterranean zone. This paper discusses how the evolution of knowledge on 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. We discuss some of the implications, obtained by the authors via dynamic simulation software complemented by pre and post processing tools purposely prepared to ameliorate and speed the treatment of comfort data. We present an optimization methodology, some results in a choice 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.