Evaluation of thermal comfort in an office building in the humid tropical climate of Benin

Benin, like most West African countries, is confronted with the lack of indoor thermal comfort standards adapted to the realities of the region. This situation leads to the adoption of Western comfort standards, the consequences of which can be seen in the discomfort of building occupants and above all in significant energy losses. This justifies the need to identify, among the many comfort models developed in the literature, those that are better adapted to the evaluation of thermal comfort in buildings in Benin. Thus, after a literature review on the subject, two comfort models were found to be relevant for the assessment of thermal comfort in air-conditioned buildings in hot and humid regions. These are the adaptive models of L´opez-P´erez and al. and Indraganti and al. The application of these two models on an air-conditioned office building located in the city of Cotonou in southern Benin, resulted in comfort temperatures of 26.1◦Cand 26◦Crespectively. These values, very close to the average neutral temperature of the occupants (26.1◦C), reveal the effectiveness of these adaptive models in assessing thermal comfort in the said building. Moreover, the application of Fanger’s static model (PMV) and hybrid models (aPMV and PMVnew) has shown that the PMVand aPMVof Yao and al. underestimate the adaptability of the occupants to relatively high comfort temperatures while the PMVnewof Olissan and al. overestimates this adaptability.