The Thermal Performance of Chinese Vernacular Skywell Dwellings

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the thermal performance of Chinese vernacular skywell dwellings. This was done by the analysis of on-site measurements of the environmental performance and computer simulation of solar conditions of eight vernacular skywell dwellings in three villages in southeastern China—Xidi, Zhifeng, and Yuyuan. Through the discussion of several heat inputs and outputs, it can be concluded that evaporative cooling had a substantial influence on the temperature in the skywells of dwellings in Xidi and Zhifeng villages. In addition to the buffering of temperature by thermal mass, evaporative cooling was found to further reduce the fluctuation in temperature inside the skywell and is likely to have been the main reason that the mean dry bulb temperatures inside the skywells in these villages were lower than the mean external dry bulb temperatures. Moreover, the construction materials of Chinese vernacular dwellings (skywell wall, floor material, wooden column, and panels) are likely to be hygroscopic.

Hygrothermal calibration and validation of vernacular dwellings: A genetic algorithm-based optimisation methodology

“…Globe Temperature; Tmrt: Mean Radiant Temperature; Va: Air Velocity; Lux: Natural illuminance; IAQ: Indoor Air Quality; dB: Sound level; U-value EW: Thermal Transmittance of the external walls; (2) Ta, RH, and Va; (3) Tmrt; (4) IAQ, Lux, dB; (5) Lux; (6) U-value; (7) MCDM: Multi-criteria Decision-Making; (8) Fi: Residuals Frequency Analysis.…”

Understanding the challenges of determining thermal comfort in vernacular dwellings: A meta-analysis

“…The simulation of vernacular dwellings is a developing research field that allows, inter alia, to obtain long-term performance predictions for a validated model, perform sensitivity and parametric analyses for improving overall performance and comfort, and examine climate change resilience and its impact on thermal comfort. In the past years, it has mainly been applied to assess thermal performance and bioclimatic strategies [22,26,[53][54][55]39,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52], thermal comfort [15,17,38,42,20,23,25,29,[32][33][34][35], energy consumption [23,55], illuminance [56], and computational fluid dynamics [57]. This section highlights the key findings stemming from the analysis of the most relevant recently published research on the simulation of vernacular dwellings for thermal performance and comfort analysis, amounting to 26 publications.…”