Study On Indoor Thermal Environment Of Yugur Folk Houses In Winter

As an ancient nomadic nation in Qilian Mountain, Yugur Nationality lives in a unique geographical environment of plateau mountain area for a long time. It has maintained good independent national traits in the integration process with outside culture. In recent years, with the support from relevant policies and rapid development of local economy and society, most herdsmen have almost ended the traditional nomadic life and transformed into a style of combining grazing with barn feeding or semi-confinement. Accordingly, great changes have happened to the housing style of Yugur herdsmen. From the academic circles, study on Yugur folk houses is almost a blank area at present, and there are few related theoretical records and articles. Thereby, from the angles of study on regional architectural culture, reduction of residential building energy consumption, protection of ecological environment in Qilian Mountain, and equalization of public service level in minorities, study on Yugur folk houses has an important value and significance.This paper starts from the evolution process of Yugur folk houses by way of resourcing, field research, and site test, and analyzes several typical buildings of Yugur folk houses at different times, such as felt house, winter house, independent brick house, and modern buildings of herdsmen. Besides, investigation is conducted for the satisfaction degree of Yugur people about thermal environmental comfort(indoor temperature, humidity, ventilation and lighting) as well as living space and cultural connotation of the folk houses by adopting interview and questionnaire survey methods. It aims to found out main characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of different building types through contrastive analysis on the satisfaction degree about thermal comfort as well as the users’ firsthand experience.Based on analysis for preliminary investigation, this paper tested the indoor and outdoor thermal environments of 3 representative typical houses of herdsmen in Yumuzhuang District, Kangle Township, Sunan Yugur Autonomous County from 20 Jan. to 22 Jan. 2015. Besides, the test data were analyzed.By combining qualitative research with quantitative analysis, this paper has extracted major factors of affecting indoor thermal environment of Yugur folk houses. It seriously summarizes the ecological experience of Yugur folk houses in coping with the weather of alpine regions. By directing at the current situation about thermal environment of Yugur folk houses and moderate concentrated settlement direction of Yugur herdsmen in the future, the author proposes some suitable suggestions in the aspects of location planning for Yugur folk houses, architectural layout, monomer building design, and energy and natural resource utilization by starting from regulation for the building patterns. The author hopes to provide a referable pattern for improving human settlement of Yugur herdsmen and increasing the housing quality.