New correlations taking into account the hourly horizontal total radiation for evaluating and predicting the indoor thermal climate

Fanger’s “Predicted Mean Vote” (PMV) is the most famous thermal sensation index but it is too complex to be applied in practice. Besides, the PMV index does not include the effect of horizontal solar radiation on the indoor thermal environment. In order to obtain simple and applicable correlations with consideration of solar radiation, a one-year measurement has been conducted in a naturally ventilated residential room in Qujing Normal University of Yunnan province, China. Based on collected data, PMV indices are calculated by the PMV model using Newton’s iterative method. The relationships of the PMV and the environmental parameters — outdoor air temperature, indoor mean air temperature, mean radiant temperature, wind velocity, relative humidity, and hourly horizontal solar radiation — have been studied by means of the multivariable regression techniques. Large numbers of simple and applicable correlations with high correlativity have been developed in the present paper. It is convenient to use them to evaluate and predict the indoor thermal environment in the natural ventilation buildings.