Lihua Zhao

• South China University of Technology

An urban canopy’s humidity significantly affects thermal comfort, public health, and building energy efficiency; however, it remains insufficiently understood. This study employed 3-year (2020–2022) fixed measurements from Guangzhou to investigate the temporal patterns of relative humidity (RH), vapor pressure (Ea), and vapor pressure deficit (VPD)...

The emergence of adaptive facades offers a new approach for buildings to enhance their resilience against external weather conditions while responding to occupants’ demands, thereby improving both indoor environmental quality and energy performance. Appropriate control methods are crucial to achieving these purposes. However, most existing studies...

The carbon emissions of urban residential buildings are substantial. However, the standard operating conditions specified in current energy-saving standards significantly differ from the actual energy consumption under real operating conditions. Therefore, it is essential to consider the impact of residents’ actual energy consumption behavior in ca...

Given the escalating urban heat island phenomenon and increasing frequency of heatwaves across the globe, many recent studies have focused on protecting human health from outdoor heat stress. Public commuting was the primary transportation way. However, there has been a significant oversight regarding the specific issue of heat stress encountered b...

Urban greenery is widely recognised as a strategy to mitigate urban overheating, and its shading capacity is crucial for improving microclimate and thermal comfort. Nevertheless, research on modelling the vegetation canopy radiation transfer (VCRT) process for the microscale is lacking, and most existing VCRT models are taken out from mesoscale mod...

Pedestrian thermal comfort is a critical factor influencing urban livability and sustainability. However, existing models often overlook its cumulative impact from dynamic thermal experiences throughout the whole-trip. This study builds on previous findings, conducting outdoor mobile observations in Guangzhou's urban blocks on clear summer days. Me...

Cs0.33WO3 (CWO) is a widely used inorganic material in window films and glass coatings, known for its excellent near-infrared radiation (NIR) blocking property and high visible light transmittance (Tvis). However, the stability of NIR blocking and the optical properties of CWO in the process of application is an urgent and important problem, becaus...

Urban surface radiometric temperatures, approximate to the surface kinetic temperatures, are predominantly retrieved using satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and exhibit pronounced spatiotemporal variations. Despite numerous methods ranging from empirical to physical models for obtaining urban microscale surface radiometric temperatures...

The interaction between humans and their environment significantly impacts the health of urban residents. However, there is limited research on assessing the spatiotemporal variations of human thermal exposure as well as inequalities and their relationships with greenspace based on remote sensing data, especially in developing countries. This study...

Walking enhances health and supports urban sustainability. Outdoor thermal comfort significantly influences people's enthusiasm for walking and the quality of their outdoor activities. When walking in urban streets, pedestrians encounter a series of unstable microclimate environments. However, current models for assessing outdoor thermal comfort ty...

The quality of natural lighting within secondary school classrooms can significantly affect the physical and mental well-being of both teachers and students. While numerous studies have explored various aspects of daylighting performance and its related factors, there is no universal standard for predicting and optimizing daylighting performance fr...

With the advancement of information technology, energy consumption prediction models are widely used for various types of buildings (office, residential, and commercial buildings) as guidance during the design and management stages. This article will establish an efficient building energy consumption prediction model for hotel buildings. To achieve...

Urban areas play a fundamental role in local-to large-scale planetary processes by altering heat, moisture, and chemical budgets. As urbanization continues globally, it is vital to acknowledge the consequence of converting natural landscapes into the built-up environment. Cities around the world are experiencing elevated temperatures and extreme he...

Land surface emissivity (LSE) represents an essential parameter for understanding land change and surface energy balance. While numerous algorithms have been proposed to retrieve LSE, they are seldom applied to remote sensing data with high spatial resolution. The SDGSAT-1 satellite provides an opportunity to retrieve LSE with high spatial resoluti...

Walking promotes human health and well-being. However, increasing temperatures due to global climate change and urban heat islands challenge urban walkability. While people navigate urban settings, they encounter asymmetrical environmental conditions not captured by most thermal comfort models. Critically, these models predominantly factor in the M...

Blue infrastructure is considered a nature-based solution to address urban heat problems. However, the potential nocturnal urban heat island (UHI) effect of water bodies has not been investigated and elaborated thoroughly. Besides, existing studies have primarily focused on surface temperature and are limited to individual cities during summer dayt...

Water bodies are often considered an effective solution to cool their surroundings in hot summers. However, their potential adverse nocturnal warming effect has not yet been investigated thoroughly or considered in current urban planning strategies. This study evaluates the diurnal thermal effects of an urban pond in Nanjing, China, and explores th...

In order to help architects Reduce energy consumption in buildings more pertinently in the early stage of design, this paper takes high-rise hotels in Guangdong as a research subject, obtains the building characteristic factor data of 28 groups of hotel samples through investigation, successively models and simulates the energy consumption value in...

Land surface temperatures (LSTs) represent a crucial parameter to characterize the urban thermal environment. Although numerous methods have been proposed to retrieve LSTs based on data from satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), challenges remain for acquiring precise pixel-level LSTs of highly heterogeneous urban surfaces on the micro sca...

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a widely studied phenomenon, characterized by unique spatiotemporal variations depending on urban structure. Seeking a simple and rapid method to monitor the Urban Heat Island Intensity (UHII) for local urban area with multiple inner morphology is essential for energy saving, citizen health, and urban planning. Hence,...

Vertical green facades (VGFs) are considered promising design strategies for reducing building energy consumption. The leaf area index (LAIv) has been considered a critical parameter in evaluating the thermal behaviour of VGFs. The LAIv is not static for a plant and changes over seasons. However, research on the seasonal variation of the LAIv and i...

Turbulent airflow around urban vegetation significantly affects transpiration cooling, pollutant dispersion, insect habitat, outdoor thermal environment, and building energy consumption. A major challenge is investigating the effect of different vegetation canopies on turbulent transfer and improving the calculation of the canopy convective heat tr...

Applying vertical green facades (VGFs) on building envelopes is an effective design strategy to reduce building energy consumption and mitigate the urban heat island effect. Although many studies have investigated the cooling and energy-saving effects of VGFs, research on the long-wave infrared radiation properties of VGFs remains scarce, limiting...

Micro-scale thermal interactions between underlying surfaces and their surrounding air in urban spaces critically influence urban residents' thermal comfort. On the micro-scale, heat can induce substantial changes in the air temperature (Ta) at the pedestrian height. To characterize the spatiotemporal distribution of the Ta for spaces adjacent to t...

Plant transpiration through stomata is crucial in land surface physical processes and the hydrosphere-atmosphere-biosphere water vapor cycle. Applying stomatal models to vertical greenery systems (VGSs) is challenging because of the unique plant habitat. However, VGSs are widely used in subtropical areas; thus, plant transpiration in these systems...

The estimation of land surface energy budgets and land surface temperature (LST) require accurate information on land surface emissivity (LSE). Despite the use of remote sensing or low altitude sensing data in numerous models for the computation of LSE, it is still highly challenging to precisely predict the LSE of high-heterogeneous surfaces on a...

As an inherent property of materials, emissivity critically reflects the material composition. Despite evidence on the positive correlation between surface moisture content (SMC) and the emissivity for soil, such correlations for other urban underlying surfaces have not been examined. Accordingly, this paper aimed to investigate the effects of SMC...

As an inherent property of materials, emissivity critically reflects the material composition. Despite evidence on the positive correlation between surface moisture content (SMC) and the emissivity for soil, such correlations for other urban underlying surfaces have not been examined. Accordingly, this paper aimed to investigate the effects of SMC...

Monitoring buildings' heat loss and quickly discovering high energy-consuming buildings in a certain area is of great significance for urban management departments to propose urban governance and management measures from the perspective of global optimization. Developing a 3D-infrared (3D-IR) model of a building or a complex created with infrared t...

The construction of nearly zero energy buildings (NZEB) has achieved dramatical impact on global warming and energy crises. It is still a challenge for designers to derive design strategies on how to achieve NZEB in the early design stage, because a complex modelling process with many input parameters of the current NZEB design and evaluation tool...

Thermal emissivity is a prerequisite for retrieving the land surface temperature (LST) and estimating the land surface budget based on data from remote sensing. Despite the availability of empirical models on emissivity retrieval on the meso-scales, their incompatibility for complex surfaces of the micro-scale leads to errors in emissivity retrieva...

Ventilation is a traditional strategy for cooling and energy saving in buildings in hot and humid climate. This study aims to develop correlations for calculating the optimal air change rate (ACH) for cooling that can be generally applied to residential buildings in Guangzhou. A bedroom prototype was built based on the typical design features of be...

The subjective thermal comfort intervention of landscape elements has been few characterized in previous studies. Therefore, we conducted field studies at eight open spaces in the residential areas of Guangzhou, a city with a humid subtropical climate in China. Data based on physical measurements and questionnaire surveys were collected under a var...

The evaluation and renovation of existing building envelope has important practical significance for energy conservation and emission reduction in the field of architecture. With the development of digital cities, 3D models with rich temperature information can realize the comprehensive and accurate detection and evaluation of the existing building...

Trees are considered to be an effective tool for improving human thermal comfort in hot climates and have been widely used in landscape architecture. However, it is not always clear how trees affect human-environment energy fluxes. In this study, an in-depth analysis of four common tree species was undertaken based on comprehensive field measuremen...

Better prediction of turbulent airflows around urban trees is necessary because it impacts urban pollutant dispersion, outdoor thermal comfort, energy efficiency, pedestrian-level comfort and urban heat island mitigation. A major challenge is how to obtain an accurate numerical model of the turbulent flow field around trees and an improved paramete...

Shade creation and radiation modification by trees is an important way of alleviating the urban heat island and improving the outdoor thermal environment. However, a major challenge is still present in numerical models: How can shade creation and radiation modification by trees be realistically represented? To address this challenge, this paper pro...

The reliable estimation of the urban heat island intensity (UHII) within an urban canopy will benefit a number of fields of research such as urban design, public health, and building energy performance. A diagnostic equation for estimating the daily maximum UHII (UHIImax), which is based on routine meteorological data and basic urban properties, wa...

An important ecosystem service provided by urban trees is the cooling effect caused by their transpiration. To quantify the cooling effect of urban trees in a hot-humid city, this study investigated the physiological indexes (leaf transpiration and leaf surface temperature) and microclimate parameters (incident solar radiation and air temperature)...

Tree morphology and characteristics are quite different among different tree species, leading to large differences in cooling performance across tree species, particularly across different climatic regions. To obtain microclimatic characteristics and data of the influence of common subtropical tree species on the outdoor thermal environment, this s...

Urban trees can significantly improve the outdoor thermal environment, especially in subtropical zones. However, due to the lack of fundamental evaluations of numerical simulation models, design and modification strategies for optimizing the thermal environment in subtropical hot-humid climate zones cannot be proposed accurately. To resolve this is...

Building simulation tools play an important role in the field of building physics. The performance of these tools relies on the understanding of related physic phenomenon and needs to be ensured by the validation. Nowadays, numbers of building simulation tools have been developed. However, most of these tools lack internationally accepted experimen...

The amount of rain water which impinged on the building envelope has a significant effect on the building envelope’s thermal performance, the indoor air humidity and the users’ health and comfort. As an important exterior boundary condition, wind-driven rain (WDR) loads estimation methodology could also be used in building energy simulation (BES) a...

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with an Urban Canopy Model (UCM) was used for studying urban environmental issues. Because land use data employed in the WRF model do not agree with the current situation around Guangzhou, China, the performance of WRF/UCM with new land-use data extracted from Remote Sensing (RS) data was eva...

Indoor sports facilities are energy-intensive in warm climates, cooling the interior to low temperatures that are comfortable for exercise. There is little existing guidance on how to do this efficiently. This study investigated thermal comfort with air movement at elevated activity levels, and the energy saving potentials with elevated setpoint te...

In order to investigate the performance of weather research and forecasting (WRF) model coupled with an urban canopy model (UCM) with an extracted land use data from Remote Sensing data (RS), three numerical experiments with different geographic models were carried out. Supervised classification with the maximum likelihood was applied to extract th...

Rational layout of vegetation can significantly alleviate the urban heat-island effect and improve outdoor thermal environment. However, quantitative researches about the impact of different vegetation species on the outdoor thermal environment are still scarce and the actual engineering problem that what’s the best choice, grass, shrub or trees ca...

This study investigated the diurnal thermal behavior of several urban surfaces and landscape components, including pavements, vegetation, and a water pond. The field experiment was conducted in a university campus of Guangzhou, South China, which is characterized by a hot and humid summer. The temperature of ground surface and grass leaves and the...

Satellite remote sensing data that lacks spatial resolution and timeliness is of limited ability to access urban thermal environment on a micro scale. This paper presents an unmanned airship low-altitude thermal infrared remote sensing system (UALTIRSS), which is composed of an unmanned airship, an onboard control and navigation subsystem, a task s...

The microclimate around a building, establishing through the interaction with the surroundings, is a significant factor affecting indoor environmental quality and building energy performance. Some simulation tools, such as ANSYS Fluent[1] and ENVI-met[2], are capable of modelling the microclimates at community scale. However, the computational cost...

Using the urban microclimate model ENVI-met to simulate urban microclimate, taking microclimate context around a building, such air temperature, air humidity, wind speed and pressure on the surface of building as the outside boundary condition of the EnergyPlus model for simulating building energy consumption, the quantitative forecast was implemen...

In response to the non-trivial problem of overheating in glass roofed buildings in low latitudes a study was undertaken to reduce discomfort and high energy consumption in a large atrium building in China. This paper reports on the development of a shading system designed for that building as a remedial solution to reduce temperatures while maintai...

The piloti is one of the important design method of LingNan architecture to adapt to the climate, piloti space is an important space meet the communication between teachers and students. The three-dimensional non-hydrostatic climate model ENVI-met were applied to simulate differents of heights of piloti and proportion of piloti. Study the effect of...

A 448 person-time field survey of thermal comfort was conducted in rural houses in east Guangdong in 2011-2012, during which the environmental parameters including air tempreture, relative humidity, globe tempreture and air velocity were recorded and the thermal sensation, acceptability and preference of inhabitants were collected. Clothing insulat...

The microclimate around a building, establishing through the interaction with other buildings or the natural environment, is a significant factor in the building energy consumption. This paper presents a method for the quantitative analysis of building energy performance under any given urban contexts by linking the microclimate model ENVI-met to t...

With the proceeding of the statistics of building energy consumption, there has been vast amounts of data on it. So a Energy Database System in buildings to processing these data is very useful. The Energy Database System in buildings is developed in this dissertation, using Access as database, Delphi6.0 as develop tool. The base information of the...

Establishing the heat-supply network availability mathematical model based on the smallest cutset under actual conditions by unified method of the probability and the fault conditions hydraulic simulation.First enumerates component fault of pipe network, simulates the flow of the heat-supply network and heat user under this operating conditions by...

A 33-hour field test of outdoor thermal environment was carried out in a typical teaching building cluster located in the hot and humid zone in summer. From the experiment results of local climate data, air temperature, humidity, wind velocity and wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) at the pedestrian-level, and the typical ground surface temperature,...

It is very difficult to measure continuously variable wind filed because of pulsating and multidirectional characteristic of natural ventilation. This study has focused on the continuous record on the indoor and windows wind speed to try to test continuously variable wind filed, with the universal breeze probe and data acquisition equipment. It wil...

Based on field study and site investigations, organized two development derivations of the represent rural dwellings in East Guangdong. Appropriate improved schemes are expounded depending on analysis priority measures of two typical units needed to optimize by actual measurement of the Indoor environmental parameters.

Aiming at the wind-tunnel experimental models with and without gas dispersion provided by the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), 15 turbulence models are employed to simulate the outdoor wind environment. Then, by the comparison between the simulated results and the wind-tunnel experimental ones, the optimal turbulence model for the numerical...

Guangdong Hakka traditional dwelling house is a wonderful flower in the garden of traditional buildings of the world. It has great value in art and history. Furthermore, Hakka traditional dwellings in Guangdong had the character of the assemble distribution in the north and east of Guangdong, the large amount of its reservation and the wide utiliza...

Polyvinylchloride (PVC) panel is one of the most favorite decorative materials that has been popularly applied as finishing of ceiling in residential buildings. It is about five years that the people incline to redecorate the ceiling of old buildings with PVC panel in big cities of Iran, such as Mashad. In this study, the influence of ceiling PVC p...

A sort of shutting valves scheme was brought forward when heat-supply network failed and a kind of network recomposition system of topology was suggested here. Based on the normal condition topology structure, this system could automatically recompose fault conditions topology structure according to the way of shutting valves scheme. Validity and e...

Natural ventilation is the most effective to reduce the energy consumption of air conditioning for residential building in Guangzhou with subtropical climate. But the effect of natural ventilation on energy saving couldn't be evaluated quantitatively at present. In this paper, an analysis method to evaluate quantitatively the energy saving potentia...

Indoor natural wind environments, annual natural temperature distributions and annual energy consumptions under two different opening areas of the glass curtain wall are studied for an airport terminal building in order to investigate the potential of using natural ventilation. The numerical simulation results show that: when the opening ratio of t...

Comb distribution was a basic style of traditional villages layout in Pearl River Delta, this kind of distribution style was not only accord with China traditional moral codes of rating but took great advantage of the local climate to make village have good ventilation. Two kinds of ventilation were in the villages, one was to use the dominant seas...

The summer outdoor thermal environments of a real residential building cluster in Guangzhou, China with different urban planning factors such as building layout, building coverage ratio, floor area ratio, first floor overhead ratio and green coverage ratio are investigated by the coupled CFD simulation of convection, radiation and conduction. The e...

In this work, the basic model of residential building clusers in South China is established, and computational fluid dynamics(CFD) method is used to simulate its outdoor wind environment. The relationship of some urban planning and design factors such as building layout, building coverage ratio, floor area ratio and first floor overhead ratio with...

The influence of a polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-panel on the cooling load of a residential apartment in Mashad, Iran, is analyzed by the DeST-h software. And the summer natural ventilation of the residential apartment is investigated to determine the wind speed into the apartment through the computational fluid dynamics software. The evaluation results...

This study uses the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method to evaluate the natural wind environment of a high-rise residential building under two unit design schemes. The impacts of openings' location and size on the indoor wind environment are also investigated. After that, the optimization advices for the adverse design scheme are brought forw...

Especial type of mid-rise residential buildings has been built in Mashad(a big city inIran)during last two decades,which have vast eastern and western walls in contact with free air.These walls are the main factor of wasting energy in these apartments because these walls are vast(high amount of energy flux)and have conventional construction method(...

Taking a certain housing in Guangzhou as an example, we conduct the field measurement of the microclimate at fixed points for air temperature, relative humidity, black globe temperature and wind speed, etc. We investigate the effects of manmade lake, shade of trees and ground surface character on outdoor thermal environment, and make a quantitative...

Located in hot and humid climate region, Guangzhou has strong solar radiation and abundant rain. Its potential of utilizing climate resource is great, and its possibility to realize passive cooling is high. The rain hours are over half of the total hours a year and the annual average rainfall can reach 1830.8 mm. Rain has been found that affect the...