From June 26, 2023 to May 23, 2023 in providence Rhode Island

This assignment is tailored to help you train your body and more generally, grow your "Thermal Literacy"—your knowledge, embodied and conceptual, and competency in the area of heat and thermal comfort. This assignment offers an experientially-based complement to lecture and other classroom content and activities. With it, some key notions such as conduction, convection, and radiation heat flows will become second nature to you! This journal will take some effort and rigor on your part. When it will feel tedious at times, please remember that expertise comes from a lot of practice and accumulated experiences. Be assured that you will draw from it for the rest of your life. Your mission, if you accept it... Your "Experiential Journal" is a diary notebook, in which you log various data: temperatures, relative humidity, airflow velocity data, and other climate and/or thermal environment information, and reflect on your observations. You will always follow a two-step protocol consisting of 1) sensing and predicting, and 2), measuring the data with either one of two devices, a non-contact infrared thermometer (IRT) and a vane anemometer fitted with air temperature and relative humidity sensors (AwRH). The two-step, 1) sense and guess, then 2) measure, process is instrumental in helping you relate and quantify your bodily sensations with the measurement data. Your "Experiential Journal" must maintain two distinct tracks: 1) "single-spot", and, 2) "random things ". Track 1, "Single-Spot" (SP) focuses on a particular location on the building envelope, typically, the corner of a window frame. The spot is chosen because it is subjected to the tug of war between the fluctuating outdoor and indoor conditions over time. Track 2, "Random things", (RT) is very open-ended, and lets you explore whatever teases your curiosity. 

 

Again, it is most important that you first sense with your body and use your judgement to guess the data in question, then measure with the appropriate device (IRT or AwRH). Use your judgment to account for the conductivity, mass or emissivity of a material, for example, to help you make a better guess/prediction. It'd be actually quite valid to write in your journal that its feels like "x" but, based on my judgment the data is probably "y" for such and such reasons. You probably should also account for particular circumstances that might influence your sensing, like for example, the fact you just exercised, or your sweating, or there being wind chill or a fan blowing, as the case may be. The data that you are tasked to collect, both predicted and measured, is: TAmb: the ambient (i.e. outdoor) air temperature rHAmb: the ambient relative humidity UAmb: the ambient wind velocity Also include relevant data: time of day, sunny/cloudy/overcast, was the spot/object in the sun 15 minutes ago, etc TAir: the indoor room air temperature rHAir: the indoor room relative humidity UAir: the indoor room wind velocity2 (if applicable, when a window is open, etc) When it comes to surface temperatures of indoor or outdoor objects, two temperature predictions are typically requested, TSurf_dist: surface temperature sensing with your hand held consistently 2" off the surface TSurf_touch: surface temperature sensing with your hand briefly touching the surface TSurf: the surface temperature actually measured with the IRT.