Influence of Humidity on Thermal Comfort for Worker Productivity in Hot-Humid Climate

Energy for cooling and heating is a sector with the largest energy consumption in building operation's energy, including office building. Unfortunately, workers in hot-humid climate prefer a cooler indoor temperature. As a result, the usage of HVAC is unavoidable. These research works were designed to understand the necessity to control relative humidity in order to control the indoor thermal comfort that will have an impact on energy saving and also occupant's productivity in tropical climate. Therefore, physiology and psychological human response towards certain environment scenario inside a climate chamber were taken into account. As a result, this study revealed the relation of human response to a change in ambient humidity in tropical climate. Specifically, tropical native prefers working in colder condition. They are also used to humidity, therefore in hotter condition, they choose humid rather than dry. Humidity only has significant effect on skin temperature. In particular, respondents choose 50 humidity as the most ideal condition among others. To further verify our experimental results, future works should include more variation humidity levels and a more detail biological observation to clear the influence of humidity on productivity. © 2019 IEEE.