Abstract
Thermal environment in the recent office has changed greatly because of the change of working style which has been brought by the development of OA equipments. On the other hand, large individual differences in preference to thermal environment exist among the occupants of an office room. Therefore the mixing-type air-conditioning system that aims to establish a uniform environment within the occupied zone of a room is not able to provide each occupant with fully accepted thermal comfort. The personal air-conditioning system is a method that can provide occupants with the controllability of a local supply of air, so as to adjust their individual thermal environment. Thus, this system has possibility of realizing both the improvements of occupants' thermal comfort and energy conservation. However, conventional personal air-conditioning system has not been accepted in the Japanese office, because it has various shortcomings. The purpose of the study is to develop personal air-conditioning system obtaining thermal comfort and energy conservation. In this paper, the drawbacks about the conventional personal air-conditioning system are examined by hearing to the designer of air-conditioning systems and the subjective experiment. As the result, it is found that subjects feel discomfort by dry eyes and breathing with difficulty, although subjects feel thermal comfort by the personal air-conditioning system. Moreover, energy is often wasted because of neglecting the personal control.
