PREDICT THE OUTDOOR THERMAL ENVIRONMENT AND THERMAL COMFORT IN ANNUAL TIME SCALE

A comfortable outdoor thermal environment is very important for pedestrian's health and safety. However, in the traditional design method, usually only several typical hours are considered. Although these typical hours can be reproduced well, considering the complicated outdoor environment and the varied weather condition, the simulation result is not capable of reproducing the overall thermal condition of a season. Therefore, the concept of annual prediction is proposed. However, the calculation amount is huge so that some simplification is necessary. A simplification for wind environment simulation is proposed and a homemade CFD code is developed to fulfil the annual prediction of wind environment. Furthermore, the most time consuming radiation simulation is simplified based on the simulation system SPOTE so that the calculation time is shortened greatly so that the annul prediction is possible. To evaluate the annual outdoor thermal comfort, the concept of,best clothes insulation' is proposed. A comfortable outdoor environment is defined as an environment in which pedestrians can reach comfortable state by adjusting the clothes insulation in a reasonable region. The best clothes insulation is defined as that can make people feel most comfortable in the specific environment. Based on this definition, some annual thermal comfort indices are proposed. A design plan of a living district is simulated and evaluated, and the results of some typical hours and the entire year are studied. The comparison shows that the results of annual prediction are more helpful for improving the design plan.