29:T535,

Ground medium can be utilized as a direct energy source to heat and cool buildings. In particular, ground source heat pump systems take advantage of the year-round mild deep earth temperature without a significant reliance on any external energy sources. However, the high installation cost of ground source heat pumps associated with high drilling cost of vertical boreholes often make these systems less cost-effective compared to conventional heating and cooling systems. Thermo-active foundations can be a viable solution to reduce ground source heat pump high installation costs by embedding heat exchangers within building foundation structures. Compared to ground source heat pumps, only limited analyses and research studies have been reported for thermo-active foundations especially for the US climates. In particular, no specific design guidelines have been reported for thermo-active foundations especially for US climates. In this paper, a simplified design approach was developed and applied for specifying geothermal heat pump size and heat exchanger loop length to meet all or part of building heat and cooling thermal loads. The developed guidelines would thus provide a proper design guide for installation of thermo-active foundations for heating and cooling of both US residential and commercial buildings.

2a:T4b0,

A field experiment was conducted at a junior high school with 35 students to compare the influence of passive versus active interaction of occupants with indoor plants and the effect of distance from plants on the participants. The participants’ data on subjective perception and objective performance were collected every four weeks over a semester. The active interaction mode group (n = 18) was required to take care of the plants in the classroom and surrounding areas, while the passive interaction mode group (n = 17) was not. The results indicated that (1) the active interaction mode had significantly greater self-reported stress restoration than the passive interaction mode with acceptable statistical power; (2) self-reported plant knowledge seemed to increase over the semester with no definite trend; (3) both active and passive interaction with plants could significantly increase self-reported attention restoration with acceptable statistical power; and (4) the plants at different distances from participants’ seats did not have different effects on participants, though the statistical power of this finding was less than ideal.

2b:T504,

For investigating the thermal comfort impact of supply air from personal nozzles on body positions of human bodies in aircraft cabins, a mock aircraft cabin with three rows of seats was built to investigate the effect of personal nozzle on thermal comfort of three main body parts, including head, upper body and lower body. In total, 12 tests were performed on 16 volunteers. Every test lasted 3 h and 40 minutes. Simultaneously, volunteers’ responses for both local and overall thermal responses were recorded. Skin temperatures were monitored. The results showed that when cooling the upper body, variation in local thermal sensation, overall thermal sensation and average skin temperature were the most significant responses produced by 16 young healthy human volunteers taking part in the experiment. However, for the airflow sensation, the strongest impact was at the head (including forehead and face), followed by the upper body part (breast, back, shoulder, abdomen) and then the lower body part (buttock, sex organ, thighs, legs and feet). In order to minimize draft discomfort, the air supply from nozzles should be delivered directly to the upper body, which would make the passengers more comfortable and benefit the optimization of the design of the nozzle.

2c:T599,