A preliminary study of multidimensional semantic evaluation of outdoor thermal comfort in Chinese

Abstract

Traditional method to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort which used indicators (UTCI, PET, SET, etc.) has its limitations. Firstly, emotional factors are not included in the assessment, and secondly, the results lead to less accessibility, and it is difficult for non-experts to understand.

Due to the above reasons, some scholars have investigated how to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort by ‘English vocabulary’, and there is still a gap in exploring the multidimensional semantic assessment of outdoor thermal comfort by using ‘Chinese vocabulary’. This paper established a ‘Chinese vocabulary’ thesaurus for outdoor thermal comfort evaluation through online and on-site questionnaire survey including 63 words, and an outdoor experiment was carried out to validate the effectiveness of the thesaurus. The results showed a significant correlation between the 2-phases results, revealing the effectiveness of the multidimensional semantic Chinese thesaurus. PET value has a wide range when Thermal Comfort Vote (TCV) are the same, and the words people used to describe the thermal environment in 5 dimensions are very different. The results showed that it is necessary to evaluate the thermal environment by the way of multidimensional semantic, which could make up the short comings of the traditional way (thermal comfort indicators).

The field validation experiment of this study was only carried out for 3 days in spring in Shenyang city, thus the result was highly influenced by the experiment conditions and has its limitations. This study could be a fundamental exploration of thermal comfort evaluation by semantic way in Chinese words.