Abstract：

Improving the health and comfort of building environments and achieving energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction without compromising the quality of the living environments is an inevitable requirement for the development of energy efficient and intelligent buildings in the future. However, how to define a comfortable environment and how to design parameters to ensure the people health and safety in indoors, relying only on the traditional subjective thermal comfort evaluation in buildings is not sufficient. Starting from the engineering problems, the study provides a scientific method for quantifying human thermal comfort based on large sample measurements on human sensitive physiological indices. Through introducing the molecular biological research and exploring the thermal sensitive Thermo-TRP channels, the study answers the engineering questions of comfort zone and safety thresholds. Understanding the physiological and thermal regulation of human body is the basis for the creation of indoor thermal environments, while molecular biology provides the molecular mechanism of temperature sensation at the micro level. This work is of benefit to understanding mechanism and design parameter in engineering practice and application. It provides a new insight and better basis for introducing interdisciplinary research methods into the field of building environment and applying basic scientific achievements to solve practical engineering problems.

Keywords:HVACdesign;thermalsensitivetransientreceptorpotential(Thermo-TRP);humanphysiologicalresponse;indoorthermalenvironment;humanthermalcomfort;thermalhealth