Seating systems are designed for occupant comfort as well as for affording occupant protection in various crash modes. FMVSS No. 207 specifies seat performance criteria, of which, one requires that a seat back withstand a minimum of 373 Nm moment measured about the seating reference point. The sufficiency of this requirement has been a source of significant debate. Some researchers believe that...

A uniform pollutant concentration in indoor environments can be an inappropriate representation of breathing concentration. This is especially true when local airflow in the vicinity of an occupant is dominant in transporting pollutants. The present study investigates the airflow in the vicinity of a human body, effects of respiration on breathing concentration of particulate and gaseous pollut...

Traditionally, in building energy modeling (BEM) programs, occupancy inputs are deterministic and less indicative of real world scenarios, contributing to discrepancies between simulated and actual energy use in buildings. This paper presents an agent-based occupancy simulator, which models each occupant as an agent with specified movement events and statistics of space uses. To reduce the amou...

Energy consumption in the residential sector is a complex socio-technical problem that can be explained using acombination of physical, demographic and behavioural characteristics of a house and its occupants. In this paper, byusing the energy consumption data for the residential sector of Shiraz in Iran, the effect of built area (BA) andoccupant number (Occ) on annual energy consumption (Ec) w...

Various factors play a part in the energy consumption of a building : its physical properties, the equipment installed for its functioning (the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system, auxiliary production of electricity or hot water), the outdoor environment and the behaviour of its occupants. While software tool designers have made great progress in the simulation of the first three ...

Over 30 000 fatalities related to the road transport system are reported anually in Europe. Of these fatalities, the largest share is car occupants, even though significant improvements in vehicle safety have been achieved by the implementation of in-crash restraints and pre-crash driver support systems. Integration of pre-crash and in-crash safety systems has a potential to further reduce car ...

Side-impact crashes are often segregated into nearside and far-side crashes because the injury mechanisms in these crash types differ. Most sideimpact research and regulations are based on nearside occupant injuries, but far-side occupants (Figure 1.B) can also incur serious harm. Near-side occupants are those which are situated on the same side as the impacted side of the vehicle (Figure 1.A)....

employees’ satisfaction based on their physical environment is an important factor that can improve employees’ performance, job satisfaction, and organizational productivity in office buildings. occupants’ environmental satisfaction are related to 10 different characteristics, including thermal comfort, air quality, lighting, acoustic quality, office layout, workspace furnishing, cleanliness an...

Contemporary office buildings commonly experience changes in occupancy patterns and needs due to changes in business practice and personal churns. Hence, it is important to understand and accurately capture the information of such trends for applications in building design and subsequent building operations. Detection of occupant presence has been used extensively in built environments for appl...