Influence of local environmental design on the interactions between indoor- and outdoor climate in urban structures

A lot of effort has been done in the recent years to understand and predict climate conditions inside of buildings, especially large offices or public facilities. The goal of this analyses is basically to optimize or minimize the energy consumption needed to establish comfortable indoor climate conditions.

Besides the complex interactions inside the building itself, the whole system, if not totally insulated, also depends on the boundary conditions such as direct radiation, wind speed and air quality at the building facade. Those conditions are very important to know for an accurate calculation of indoor climate and air conditions.

It is obvious, that these parameters are strongly influenced by the outdoor microclimate conditions, which again depend on the constellation of nearby urban structures. Numerical microscale models are widely used to calculate the surface- plant - air interactions inside urban environments and predict the local climate. Although these models could also provide detailed information about the exchange processes at the building facades, those information are normally not used.

The posters presents some studies done with the three-dimensional non-hydrostatic mircoclimate model ENVI-met. The ENVI-met interface has been extended, in order to extract detailed information about the processes at the walls of selected buildings inside the simulated domain. Numerical experiments will show how small-scale urban design influences the boundary conditions of the buildings system.