Abstract
In recent years, the adoption of energy-saving measures has been widely promoted in workplaces. Such measures include turning off the lights automatically while workers are absent and introducing office automation equipment with sleep mode. Thus, the absence or presence of workers tends to cause a large variation in the thermal load within an office. In this paper, a workplace is modeled using several combinations of patterns based on the assumption of internal thermal load generation in accordance with workers' absence or presence in order to understand such variations quantitatively. Furthermore, a case study involving the simulation of a general-type single-duct VAV system is conducted to quantitatively understand the influence of internal thermal load variation which is mainly dependent on variations in the presence rate and its effects on the air-conditioning energy consumption and indoor thermal environment.
