Thermal comfort in office buildings during the summer season: Findings from a field study in Kuwait

Abstract

A thermal comfort field study was conducted in four office buildings in Kuwait for four months in the summer of 2016. All the four environmental and two personal variables were measured. Through a paper based survey, a total of 611 responses were collected from 284 different thermal environments. The mean comfort temperature was found to be 22.5 °C. This finding shows that people are very much accustomed to overcooled building environments that lack provisions for thermal adaptation. The subjects adapted mainly through clothing and very little environmental controls which were available to them. The mean clo values of non western clothing was found to be higher than that of the insulation of the western clothing. In 86.6% of the cases, the air speed was below 0.2 m/s. The predicted mean vote significantly overestimated the actual sensation always. An adaptive model specific to Kuwait's climate must be developed and this research is a stepping stone to address this issue. This study calls for elaborate field studies in offices in Kuwait for the development of custom made adaptive comfort standards and a verified thermal comfort scale in Arabic to be uniformly used in surveys in the Middle Eastern Region.