Investigation of air velocity effect on thermal comfort in mosques-hot- dry climate

In hot climate areas, the proper understanding of thermal comfort parameters leads to help building designers in providing a suitable and refreshing environment for occupants. The rational model such as ASHRAE 55/2013, ISO: 7730 defines comfort boundaries based on the experimental results, which are conducted in climatic chambers. Research works have been rarely conducted in buildings with high density of occupants like mosques. In order to study the thermal comfort and the effect of air velocity in mosques in hot dry climate, a rational and adaptive comfort study by applying ASHRAE 55, ISO: 7730/10551 is carried out in Eloued city, Algeria. The results show that the applicability of ISO7730 is suitable for a natural air velocity v_air∈[0.35,0.8]m⁄s, where the comfortable operative temperature is 30.7°C. However this outcome doesn’t exceed 26.8°C for air velocity vair< 0.35m/s.