A review paper on thermal comfort and ventilation systems in educational buildings: nano-mechanical and mathematical aspects.

Abstract

Thermal comfort has always been an essential factor that affects students’ productivity and success. Students spend considerable time at their schools or universities more than any other building type except their homes. Thus, indicating the importance of providing thermal comfort in educational buildings. Many studies worldwide are conducted to assess and optimize thermal comfort inside classrooms. However, the results have not been accurate even for similar study conditions due to the differences in the studies’ conditions. This paper focuses on thermal comfort studies in educational buildings (classrooms). The studies are divided into two sections, the first covering field studies methodologies, objective, and subjective questionnaires, and the second reviewing thermal comfort results based on the climatic zone, educational level, and analysis approach. It is recommended that thermal comfort studies be carried out using rational and adaptive models as they provide more accurate, reliable results. Also, it is found that thermal comfort standards are generally inadequate to assess thermal comfort in classrooms. Thus, other international standards should be created and considered for classroom assessment. Over the past few years, the combination between nanotechnology and architecture engineering has been widely used in several disciplines because of its crucial significance in finding new nanodevices to contribute in reducing of energy consumption, particularly on construction materials. Filling functionalized tools with nanoparticles plays a critical role in improving the thermal and optical properties, particularly with respect to nanofluids applications, i.e., buildings applications of thermal comfort. The experimental results of long-term studies show that the calculation values of optimization have a consistent agreement with the experimental transmission of nanofluids models.