Thermal Comfort with Heat Adaptation of School-Age Children–Model Development and Validation

Maintaining thermally comfortable environments in educational buildings is important for supporting students’ cognitive function, well-being, and learning performance. However, current thermal comfort standards for building environmental design have largely been based on adults and do not adequately account for the physiological differences of children. This paper develops and validates a comfort model for school-age children. The model extends the capability of the recently-developed MPMV model for adults, by incorporating age-dependent metabolic rates, thermoregulation, and heat physiological adaptation. The proposed model is validated using thermal sensation votes (TSV) collected from seven independent experiments in climatic chambers and ten field studies in air-conditioned and free-running schools under various climate conditions worldwide. The model performance is evaluated against the observed TSV using the RMSE index. For reference purposes, the adults’ PMV model is also included in the benchmark. The results demonstrate that the proposed model consistently produces good results with RMSE between 0.17 and 0.44 for urban and rural schools. In contrast, the adults’ PMV model produces inconsistent results with large discrepancies in most cases with RMSE between 0.27 and 1.04. The improvement is particularly pronounced in naturally-ventilated urban and rural schools, where adult-based comfort models systematically mis-predict children’s thermal sensation. These findings support the need for child-specific thermal comfort criteria and offer a robust analytical basis for improving classroom’s environmental design and operation, and future development of thermal comfort standards that explicitly consider children’s needs.