A influência do clima no conforto térmico em escritórios com PCMs no Brasil

Incorporating Phase Change Materials (PCMs) into indoor environments can enhance users' thermal comfort and improve the building's energy efficiency. However, the number of PCM studies in hot and humid climates, such as most Brazilian conditions, is comparatively less developed than research for temperate climates. This article investigates the influence of climatic parameters on the PCMs' function to enhance user thermal comfort in an office model in Brazilian climates employing thermo-energy simulation using EnergyPlus for 95 cities with adaptive thermal comfort as a performance indicator. We employed machine learning techniques, including Gradient Boosting and Feature Importance, to quantify the influence of climate parameters, followed by Principal Component Analysis clustering. Results show that incorporating PCMs can potentially increase user thermal comfort in part of Brazil, mainly in cities with average temperatures below 21°C. The comfort increase is not homogeneous, being more relevant in regions with colder temperatures and higher altitudes. When considering better-performing cities, the most influential climatic parameters were dry bulb temperature, relative humidity, and wind direction.