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Outdoor Microclimate Influence on Building Performance: Simulation Tools, Challenges, and Opportunities

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New Technologies in Building and Construction

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering ((LNCE,volume 258))

Abstract

This chapter reviews the different approaches that currently exist to evaluate outdoor microclimates and their influence on building performance. Considering specific outdoor microclimates in building design flow can enable additional passive cooling strategies to mitigate climate risks in buildings and cities, improving their resilience capacity under extreme heat events. The available methods are defined and compared through different case studies of buildings with an inner courtyard, a traditional microclimate for passive cooling in hot climates. The results show the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches and highlight the high interest in hybrid simulations coupling building energy simulation (BES) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools for early design stages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The aspect ratio is the relation between the width and the height of the courtyard, following the equation AR = Height/Width.

  2. 2.

    Thermal gap is defined as the difference between the outdoor temperature and the temperature inside the courtyard, as follows: TG = Toutdoor -Tcourtyard.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the grant RTI2018-093521-B-C33 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe” and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport via a pre-doctoral contract granted to V.P. L-C. (FPU17/05036) and E. D-M (FPU18/04783). The research was also supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101023241.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Construcciones Arquitectónicas 1, Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura y Ciencias de la Construcción, Universidad de Sevilla, Avda. Reina Mercedes, 2, 41012, Seville, Spain

    Victoria Patricia López-Cabeza, Eduardo Diz-Mellado, Carlos Rivera-Gómez & Carmen Galán-Marín

  2. Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PJ, UK

    Jesus Lizana

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  1. Victoria Patricia López-Cabeza
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Correspondence to Victoria Patricia López-Cabeza .

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  1. Department of Building Construction, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    David Bienvenido-Huertas

  2. Department of Graphical Expression and Building Engineering, University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Juan Moyano-Campos

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López-Cabeza, V.P., Lizana, J., Diz-Mellado, E., Rivera-Gómez, C., Galán-Marín, C. (2022). Outdoor Microclimate Influence on Building Performance: Simulation Tools, Challenges, and Opportunities. In: Bienvenido-Huertas, D., Moyano-Campos, J. (eds) New Technologies in Building and Construction. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 258. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1894-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1894-0_7

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