Effect of thermal, acoustic, and lighting environment in underground space on human comfort and work efficiency: A review

The development and utilization of underground spaces can ease the shortage of urban land resources, ensure urban safety, and improve the urban ecological environment. Human overall comfort and work efficiency in underground spaces are affected by several environmental factors, such as thermal, acoustic, and lighting. Owing to the particularities of an underground space at any given location, the guarantee of a comfortable indoor environment is different from that in aboveground buildings. Based on the thermal, acoustic, and illumination characteristics of an underground space, the main differences between underground spaces and aboveground buildings, limitations of current standards/codes, and imperfections of internal environmental evaluation indicators are summarized and analyzed, and human comfort and work efficiency in terms of one-way and three-way interactions are discussed based on the literature published since 2000. The findings reveal that the current standards/codes for underground spaces mainly refer to aboveground buildings. Where the parameter index is single, there exists a large difference between the underground environment and the design standard, and there is no evaluation index for human comfort in underground spaces. In the existing research, two methods have been adopted: field surveys and climate room experiments. These have mainly focused on the effects of thermal, acoustic, and lighting environment unidirectional control on personnel comfort, while only a few studies have been conducted on work efficiency. Research on the three-directional interactions involving thermal, acoustic, and lighting environments in underground spaces is lacking. The creation of a microenvironment based on local cooling and heating, and the technologies generated under the concepts of imitating the ground environment, imitating the natural environments, and thermal–acoustic–light coordinated control are expected to play important roles in the construction of underground space environments in the future, and lay the foundation for the construction of an ecological environment system in underground spaces. [Display omitted] •Current standards/codes have limitations.•The internal environment evaluation index is not perfect; its results are quite different from perceived human overall comfort.•There is a large gap in research on the comfort and work efficiency of personnel working in underground spaces.