Research on Two Types of Buffer Zone Impact on Surrounding Office Space Environment in Winter in Cold Climate Zone—a Fieldwork in Architectural Design Institute Building of Tsinghua University,Beijing

Building buffer zone space is not only one of essential approaches for better mental quality of interior building space, but also an important factor that may influence interior thermal comfort and energy consumption. This study aims to analyze regulative advantages of buffer zone to the surrounding functional spaces. Based on a fieldwork test in a typical office building in cold climate zone in Beijing,China,the monitor data show interior physical performance in the Winter. The research selects two types of different buffer zones in the same building. One is a south-faced greenhouse which has large dimension with plenty of vegetation,and the other is a simple atrium in the middle of five floor building with mount of skylights. The factors and their influence to surrounding functional spaces and the whole building are found out from the comparisons of collected data by floor to floor monitor test on both buffer zones at the same time. The comparisons of two types of buffer zones conclude that the greenhouse is more effective to air quality regulation but not so clearly wellperformed to thermal buffering as expected due to the dominate active central heating in the Winter. This fieldwork test results for building performance can be helpful for both architects and engineers in the early phase of sustainable design.

Field Study on Indoor Thermal and Luminous Environment in Winter of Vernacular Houses in Northern Hebei Province of China

In this paper,a climate-adaptation study of vernacular houses in northern Hebei Province has been conducted based on quantitative field surveys. Three typical vernacular houses with different kinds of building envelopes were selected. The field surveys included investigation on building material and construction,measurement of indoor thermal environment, infrared thermographic study of building envelopes and measurement of luminous environment. The results showed that the indoor air temperatures were below thermal comfort zone from late night till early morning and the horizontal temperature gradient was obvious. The adobe wall showed better thermal performance than the other two. As for the building layout,it is beneficial to put a storeroom on the north side of the house as a temperature buffer zone. Furthermore,due to missing insulation and the informal process of construction,significant amounts of heat escaped from building envelopes,especially from the corner of wall,ceiling and around the openings. The daylight factors on the work plan in the main rooms were accordance with design standards and the level of illuminance met the requirements of family's daily activities.

WRF Environment Assessment in Guangzhou City with an Extracted Land-use Map from the Remote Sensing Data in 2000 as an Example

Mesoscale urban environment forecast combined with WRF is a current frontier in international academic. Taking Guangzhou as an example,the new land-use model presented by the present authors,the existing USGS and MODIS models in WRF were firstly compared to the remote sensing model in this article.The comparison result shows that the land-use model presented by the authors has the highest similarity with the remote sensing data. Secondly,the new land-use model was used to replace the defaulted land-use data in WRF for simulation. By comparing this simulation results with the WRF results using the defaulted USGS and MODIS model,it was showed that the geographic models have a great impact on the mesoscale environment forecast result. Also,the geographic information model presented in this article shows the best accuracy when comparing with the observation data. Results in this study are going to be an important reference in the contemporary international forefront of mesoscale urban environment studies by WRF.