Improving residential building arrangement design by assessing outdoor ventilation efficiency in different regional spaces

ABSTRACT

Using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations, the correlation between residential building arrangement designs and ventilation efficiency of various outdoor spaces is explored. Three indices—purging flow rate (PFR), visitation frequency (VF) and air residence time (T_p)—are adopted to quantify the ventilation efficiency of regional outdoor spaces. Using these indices, changes in residential building lateral spacing, building length, and stagger size were investigated under the effects of different surrounding building arrays for different wind directions. The simulation results indicated that wind direction is the most important factor for improving the residential wind environment, regardless of the patterns of the surrounding building arrays. When the angle between the wind direction and the building’s main façade orientation is more than 30°, the ventilation of different outdoor spaces improves. Staggered surrounding building arrays lower the spatial ventilation of the studied areas. However, this staggering does not affect the variation trend of spatial ventilation influenced by building arrangement design changes.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable comments and discussions provided by Dr. Zhi Gao, Dr. Jian Hang and Dr. Zhi Chen on the simulation technique and ventilation efficiency performance. The authors also would like to acknowledge DigitalGlobe and Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) for providing the images of view picture of typical residential building arrangements in China.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The National Key Research and Development Programme of China supported this work under [grant number: 2017YFC0702502]; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under [grant numbers: 51508262 and 51538005].