Heat management in a campus cafeteria with optimal insulation thickness for thermal comfort of a space-variant manikin

Thermal comfort modelling of a university cafeteria, represented by the space occupied by a manikin, is developed using a two-dimensional finite volume formulation. An energy audit assessment including performance data collected from both vendors and customers of the facility is performed. Environmental and physiological data are gathered and simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to obtain realistic solutions of the energy performance and thermal comfort, and the results are validated with thermal sensation models. The thermal sensation of the occupants within an asymmetrical environment like the 2001 campus cafeteria is validated with Fanger's model, using the temperature distribution predicted with CFD. A Newton-Raphson method permits optimisation of the insulation thickness, which is capable of altering the asymmetric variation of the indoor environment and the possible attainment of energy savings through optimal building materials.