Thermal comfort assessment in semi-outdoor environments:: Application to comfort study in stadia

The present study addresses thermal comfort assessment of outdoor and semi-outdoor environments. Two stadium case studies are used to demonstrate the potentiality of the approach that combines wind tunnel data and the calculation of human heat balance due to particular climatic environments. The thermal index PET (physiological equivalent temperature) is used to evaluate the thermal comfort in such complex environments. The specificities of stadium semi-outdoor spaces are summarised and the necessary assumptions made to apply the computation procedure are described. The approach includes assumptions on the thermo-physical phenomena as well as geometric computations. This work benefited from the development of an interactive design tool of built environments (outdoor urban surroundings): EVE (enriched virtual environments). It is a virtual reality platform developed at CSTB to help designers, architects and urban planners to evaluate the various options in competition regarding acoustic, visual,thermal and wind comfort of pedestrian in a particular urban environment. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.