Conference Agenda

BIM use on the rise in New Zealand with popular software packages, including Revit and ARCHICAD, adopting a semi-automated simulation platform. This allows architects and designers to calculate the thermal and energy performance of their designs. This paper aims to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these semi-automated simulation platforms. The objective is to investigate how accurate their assumptions are in determining a reliable output for use in achieving compliance with Clause H1 of the New Zealand Building Code. To achieve this, this paper will conduct a comparative study that examines the software’s ability to calculate construction R-values, interpret thermal properties and simulate energy performance. The results from this study show that there is a significant difference between the simulation results of the two software packages, due to the assumptions made by the default settings. It also identifies the disadvantages of the inbuilt construction R-value calculators and explores a potential path to resolving this through redefining the inputs of thermal properties.

In high-density urban areas in Asia, pedestrian-level wind environment is highly-related to human health and thermal comfort. However, it is still uncertain how irregular breezeways should be connected and oriented for optimizing the pedestrian-level wind velocity ratio (VRw). This paper used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to compare VRw in regular and irregular breezeway patterns in four actual high-density urban areas of Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. Two representative wind directions were considered for each urban area. The simulation method was validated by the wind tunnel experimental data of an actual urban area in Japan. Three indices, road density (RD), irregularity ratio (IR) and building coverage ratio (BCR), were proposed to estimate VRw by applying regression analysis. The paper suggests the following results: 1) urban patterns with lower RD and BCR have better ventilation regardless of wind directions; 2) urban patterns with higher IR tends to benefit the airflow penetration in the deep urban area; 3) BCR (R-squared = 0.7488), as a single index, can most effectively estimate VRw; 4) IR together with BCR (R-squared = 0.9805) can more effectively estimate VRw. The proposed indices, especially IR, may help planners to improve road pattern design for obtaining better ventilation.

This paper discusses the comfort and energy impact of green actions for schools in northern China. Green roof, green façade, tree planting and grass pavement, were evaluated using a case study regarding their outdoor discomfort hours and building cooling demand in summer. Results show that planting trees is the most effective school design strategy in both reducing discomfort time and cooling demand. Green roof and green façade can also decrease the building cooling demand, yet with little effects on the outdoor comfort. Natural grass pavement has only a slight effect on both the outdoor comfort and building cooling demand.

This study is aimed to provide reliable evidences of occupants’ view clarity through window affected by direction and angle of the shading blinds for multi-objective design optimization. The study was performed in a lab of Tianjin University in northeast of China, with 18 human subjects, and the data were collected to analyse the relationship between different external shading blinds and view clarity through window. Then the results were used to develop an empirical model to calculate the angle of external shading blinds that can qualify the minimum view clarity level. It can be concluded that the angle of horizontal shading blinds should not exceed 33.2°and the angle of vertical shading blinds should not exceed 48.4°so as to reach the minimum view clarity level.