Integral design of micro climate and control strategies for nearly zero energy office buildings

Traditionally, HVAC systems condition the whole room in which occupants stay and as a result provide them with comfortable indoor climate conditions. However if we could only concentrate on the occupants themselves we could save energy and reduce the needed capacity for ventilation, heating and cooling. This because we than only have to provide optimal indoor conditions to a small part of the rooms. This strategy is especially interesting for Nearly Zero Energy Office Buildings as it has potential to strongly reduce the energy demand. A specific design method, Integral Design, was applied to come up with a solution to integrate the conditionings control strategy on an individual workplace level, to improve thermal comfort and reduce energy consumption. The radiant panel of the developed microclimate system was tested to see if it met the comfort demands of the sensitive body parts in the winter and could lead to reduced energy consumption. The experiments show that the finger-tips are one of the most critical performance indicators for localized thermal comfort. However more research is needed to further investigate the correlations between provided heating and perceived thermal comfort under all kind of conditions.