IEQ assessment on schools in the design stage

Nowadays, the indoor environment quality (IEQ) is growing as a new and very useful index of the building quality. The current literature presents the IEQ assessment based on questionnaires applied for existing building. The original approach of this study consists in the development of an IEQ index model that can be used by architects and engineers during design stage, in order to use it as an evaluation indicator or optimize the building energy consumption versus indoor environmental conditions. Based on a large database of values resulted from simulations, multiple non-linear regression models were obtained in order to predict variables such as operative temperature, indoor sound pressure level, indoor average illuminance and specific energy consumption. A predictive model for IEQ index is proposed as a function of the four quality indexes (air quality, thermal, acoustic and visual comfort). The entire approach was tested by means of a study case where the impact of windows' size and type on the IEQ assessment is discussed for a random climate. Also, there are presented detailed results concerning the monthly variation of IEQ and its correlation with the energy consumption. The proposed method proves to be a fast and useful method to verify architectural and engineering solutions according to the IEQ estimator. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.