Climate change and the urgency of decarbonizing the built environment are driving technological innovation in the way we deliver thermal comfort to occupants. These changes, in turn, seem to be setting the directions for contemporary thermal comfort research. This article presents a literature review of major changes, developments, and trends in the field of thermal comfort research over the last 20 years. One of the main paradigm shift was the fundamental conceptual reorientation that has taken place in thermal comfort thinking over the last 20 years; a shift away from the physically based determinism of Fanger's comfort model toward the mainstream and acceptance of the adaptive comfort model. Another noticeable shift has been from the undesirable toward the desirable qualities of air movement. Additionally, sophisticated models covering the physics and physiology of the human body were developed, driven by the continuous challenge to model thermal comfort at the same anatomical resolution and to combine these localized signals into a coherent, global thermal perception. Finally, the demand for ever increasing building energy efficiency is pushing technological innovation in the way we deliver comfortable indoor environments. These trends, in turn, continue setting the directions for contemporary thermal comfort research for the next decades.

This survey of thermal comfort in classrooms aimed to define empirically the preferred temperatures, neutral temperatures and acceptable temperature ranges for Australian school children, and to compare them with findings from adult populations. The survey was conducted in a mixture of air-conditioned, evaporative-cooled and naturally ventilated classrooms in nine schools located in three distinct subtropical climate zones during the summer of 2013. A total of 2850 questionnaires were collected from both primary (grade) and secondary (high) schools. An indoor operative temperature of about 22.5°C was found to be the students’ neutral and preferred temperature, which is generally cooler than expected for adults under the same thermal environmental conditions. Despite the lower-than-expected neutrality, the school children demonstrated considerable adaptability to indoor temperature variations, with one thermal sensation unit equating to approximately 4°C operative temperature. Working on the industry-accepted assumption that an acceptable range of indoor operative temperatures corresponds to group mean thermal sensations of −0.85 through to +0.85, the present analysis indicates an acceptable summertime range for Australian students from 19.5 to 26.6°C. The analyses also revealed between-school differences in thermal sensitivity, with students in locations exposed to wider weather variations showing greater thermal adaptability than those in more equable weather districts.