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Research on the influence of outdoor trees on natural ventilation performance of an academic building

  • Research Article
  • Indoor/Outdoor Airflow and Air Quality
  • Published:
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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 April 2024

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Abstract

Planting trees around buildings has always been used as one of the most common viable landscaping strategies in schools. However, the impact of trees on natural ventilation inside the building has been neglected without investigation. The emphasis of this study related to the impact of outdoor trees around the academic building on indoor ventilation. Numerical simulations of the indoor wind environment of the academic building affected by trees were performed utilizing the k-ε model with additional source terms. The numerical model was also validated by measured data. Two kinds of trees were selected, they are camphor and metasequoia. Camphor is a kind of broad-leaved tree and metasequoia is a kind of coniferous tree. 26 simulation cases with six different tree canopy spacings were conducted. These results showed that the outdoor trees had great influences on the natural ventilation performance of the academic building. Compared with the case without the trees, the highest decrement in ventilation flow rate could be up to 31.97% in this study. For the cases of classrooms with horizontal distribution, the ages of air of the classrooms became fresher with the increase of the canopy spacing. While for the cases of classrooms with vertical distribution, the canopy spacing had fewer effects on the natural ventilation performances. It was also found that the blocking effects of camphor on indoor ventilation were higher than that of metasequoia. The average ventilation flow rate in cases with metasequoia was increased by 14.89% compared to the cases with camphor. This study could provide guidance for the layout design of trees around the building.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of China (No. 2020YFC1522304), the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52078118), and the Opening Fund of State Key Laboratory of Green Building in Western China (No. LSKF202107).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Architecture, Southeast University, No. 2 Sipailou, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Shengnan Niu, Annan Wang, Lufang Chen, Xin Zhou & Xing Jin

  2. College of Architecture & Urban Planning, Tongji University, Key Laboratory of Ecology and Energy Saving Study of Dense Habitat, Ministry of Education, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Xiaodong Liu & Xing Shi

  3. Engineering Research Center of BEEE, Ministry of Education, Xicheng, China

    Xing Jin

  4. School of Energy and Environment, Southeast University, No. 2 Sipailou, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Liu Yang

Authors
  1. Shengnan Niu
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  2. Xiaodong Liu
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  3. Annan Wang
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  4. Lufang Chen
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  5. Xin Zhou
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  6. Xing Shi
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  7. Liu Yang
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  8. Xing Jin
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Shengnan Niu, Xiaodong Liu, Annan Wang, and Lufang Chen. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Shengnan Niu and Xing Jin. Review, editing and supervision were performed by Shengnan Niu, Xin Zhou, Xing Shi, Liu Yang, and Xing Jin. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xing Jin.

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The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Niu, S., Liu, X., Wang, A. et al. Research on the influence of outdoor trees on natural ventilation performance of an academic building. Build. Simul. 16, 927–946 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0977-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0977-x

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