Employee comfort

For a climate-neutral building stock in 2050, as can be seen in the federal government's climate protection plan, passive strategies for indoor climate conditioning are a key component in order to reduce energy consumption and operating costs. While newly constructed or extensively renovated residential buildings only have very low energy requirements, the potential for savings in non-residential buildings is often wasted. The reason for this is the low prioritisation of energy-saving measures related to building operations, which, in contrast to the production-related energy flows required, may only play a marginal role in relative terms. Often, measures to save energy are also expected to reduce comfort and thus reduce motivation or performance on the part of employees. This applies to office as well as many general company workplaces.

The conflict of summer comfort often lies in the fact that the contemporary architecture with flexible floor plan design, great transparency, an airtight and thermally optimized design and increasing staff density require active cooling of the rooms in order to create a comfortable work space. Active cooling, on the other hand, causes additional energy consumption, which makes climate-neutral management of buildings more difficult. Passive measures are one way of compensating for the active cooling, at least in part.

Our expertise here is in the energy and comfort optimisation of buildings. This includes evaluation, simulation and monitoring in order to design resource-saving, energy-efficient, comfortable and healthy buildings. A particular focus here is on the investigation of passive measures to compensate or minimise technical systems while maintaining comfort.