Hygrothermal Performance of Portuguese Classrooms: Measurement and Computer Simulation

Abstract

The rehabilitation of school buildings is an imperative in Portugal. The current buildings do not guarantee adequate conditions of habitability. So, a very ambitious public plan for rehabilitation of school buildings which involves substantial investments is being carried. It is essential to support this investment plan with a thorough investigation that could help and sustain the technical decisions to be taken. To that end a research project has started with two main objectives: to evaluate the suitability of the legal requirements currently in use in Portuguese codes regarding comfort conditions and ventilation rates through the measure-ment of temperature, relative humidity and carbon dioxide concentration in classrooms of different schools; and make an optimization of constructive solutions to be used in retrofitting of school buildings using com-puter simulations, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. This paper presents the initial results of this project, from the measured values starts a preliminary discussion and launches the future works of the re-search project.