Health & Comfort

Ensuring the Health and Comfort of building occupants requires a delicate balance between a large number of interacting environmental factors. Buildings need to respond to occupants’ changing needs and – at the same time – to variable outdoor climate conditions. In order to identify relevant issues and provide successful design solutions, numerous disciplines must effectively work together. The group answers these challenges through its experience in various topics that consider indoor environmental quality from different – but complementary – points of view.

Three Chairs contribute to multidisciplinary research at different levels: building physics, human, and building systems.

The Chair of Building Physics and Services focuses on building technologies and building performance assessments that promote energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. Research topics include the control and interaction of active and passive building systems, and their influence on indoor comfort. Methods range from field experiments, laboratory tests and building performance simulation.

The Chair of Indoor Environment focuses on the building occupants’ health, comfort, and preferences, as influenced by building, environmental, indoor, and outdoor factors.  It has four lines of research: occupant patterns and profiles and environmental scenarios; indicators and assessments of methods used to explain effects on humans; building level implementation; and product-level implementation (concerning practical design solutions).

The Chair of Building Services Innovations deals with the research into appropriate building services that are developed with the end-user's attributes in mind, in a way that will support the users’ comfort and health, and in an energy-efficient way.