Establishment of outdoor thermal comfort index groups for quantifying climate impact on construction accidents. (April 2023) - Hwang, Jiwon
Highlights: Climate impacts on construction accidents is quantified using PET and clustering. Accidents probability was below the baseline in the PET comfort zone. Accident probability increased when PET index is over 24℃ and below 2.4℃. Seven groups of PET index were developed to classify the accident probability. Abstract: The construction industry is significantly influenced by various outdoor weather factors, which affect the thermal comfort of workers and, subsequently their productivity and health. Existing studies regarding outdoor thermal comfort only consider the daytime or a specific season. However, this study considers all seasons and regions based on accident data and aims to analyze the relationship between construction accidents and the outdoor thermal comfort index based on the frequency and probabilities by using accident data from the construction industry. In addition, Physiological equivalent temperature groups based on their impact on accidents are developed to classify the accident probability by climate index level. This study is conducted in the following five steps: (i) collection of data, (ii) calculation of the outdoor thermal comfort, (iii) calculation of the relative frequency, and (iv) conducting statistical analyses. As a result of the relative probability analysis, which is the concept of probability, it was found that the probability of accidents was the highest at PET temperature of 34.7 °C and 2.95. That is, as the PET temperature decreases or increases, the relative frequency indicating the probability of an accident increases. In addition, seven outdoor thermal comfort index grades were classified based on relative frequency.