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ENVI-met BioMet

 ENVI-met Biomet Interface

ENVI-met Biomet is a post-processing tool to calculate human thermal comfort indices based on your simulation data. It directly interacts with the ENVI-met output and lets you interactivly set the persons parameter, the Thermal Comfort Index and the range of calculation.

Thermal Comfort Indices provided by BioMet 1.5

In the recent version 1.5, Biomet supports PMV/PPD (Predicted mean vote), PET* (Physiologal Equivalent Temperature), UTCI* (Universal Thermal Climate Index) and SET* (Standard Effective Temperature), but more are likely to be integrated. (*: only available with the Professional license of Biomet). The indices vary in their level of complexity and therefore calculation time. While UTCI is regression based and quick, PMV requires the iterative solution of one energy balance equation and PET requires the solution of two of them and is hence much more calculation time expensive. Compared to former version of ENVI-met, the calculation of Thermal Comfort Indices as a post-processing step allows to modify e.g. personal settings without running ENVI-met again.

However, it is important to understand, that a proper Thermal Comfort Index can only be calculated if the microclimate data used are correctly and/or sensefull. First you need valid ENVI-met simulation output, then you can calculate Thermal Comfort.

Follow the links to know more about the different indices:

Which Comfort Index shall I use?

This is the big and holy question. The fact, that BioMet already supports 4 of them gives a clue, that there is no generally accepted answer. We suggest reading the paper by Fischereit and Schlünzen (2018) (Paper in International Journal of Biometeorology, Open Access) for a detailed discussion on this matter.

The suggest to use PET as a thermal comfort indicator.

Running BioMet

A very basic and very rough guide on how to use BioMet can be found here: Biomet Quick-Start. This includes information on how to upgrade to the licensed version of BioMet.

Upgrade to BioMet Professional

To calculate other indices apart from PMV, you need to have Professional license of ENVI-met BioMet.

From August 2019, the Professional Version is included in the BUSINESS and STUDENT editions. For the SCIENCE site license, it must be ordered as an add-on. See out main page for details.

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