Thermal comfort analysis: comparison between model and experimental data in tropical climate

Humans in the 21st century spend nearly 90% of their time in an indoor environment. This environment is far from the one in which humans have developed their physiological adaptation and regulation mechanisms. The indoor environment must be optimized for wellbeing and cognitive performance with an anthropocentric and multidisciplinary approach. The objective of this paper is to identify and evaluate the reliability of approaches to characterize thermal comfort in a humid tropical climate. To do so, we will present (i) an experiment conducted to evaluate this perception in a quantitative (physical measurements) and qualitative (field survey) way, and finally (iii) an intermodal and experimental comparison analysis. The results reveal some notable discrepancies between numerical approaches and experimental data. This finding reinforces our study perspectives on the need to engage a multimodal and multidisciplinary analysis to improve the accuracy of comfort models.