Thermal Comfort Analysis
Create desirable outdoor spaces where people want to be
(and return to again and again).
Outdoor thermal comfort
From sunny squares and rooftop patios to sheltered balconies and darkened corners, outdoor spaces can subject users to a wide range of climate conditions throughout each day, season, and year. The wrong combinations can render spaces unusable.
Don’t wait until the project is built to discover that a promising outdoor space is not the thriving oasis it was envisioned to be.
Why outdoor thermal comfort analysis matters
Early thermal comfort analysis ensures outdoor spaces are usable when they were intended, so that they can become thriving destinations, maximizing property value and economic performance for both tenants and owners by:
- Attracting more foot traffic to ground-level businesses
- Extending the seasonal availability of outdoor amenities
- Ensuring user comfort in a range of conditions
How thermal comfort analysis works
Orbital Stack’s Thermal Comfort analysis provides objective metrics (e.g., SPMV*, UTCI) and vivid imagery that show how outdoor spaces meet their desired usage profiles.
The thermal comfort analysis combines wind and solar simulations of your site geometry with a complex array of climate data, including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, wind direction and speed, summarizing the results in plots that indicate the overall thermal comfort of patrons in that space.
By accounting for clothing and activity levels, users can divide the analysis into custom seasons and time ranges, tailored to ensure that spaces achieve the design goals of the programming that was intended for them.
What users are saying
Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture used Orbital Stack thermal comfort and wind analysis to inform two major projects. Thermal comfort studies confirmed that ambitious plans to lift a tower would meet the objectives of enabling public access without compromising healthy air movement, pedestrian comfort, and low carbon footprint goals.
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