Study On Indoor Thermal Environment Of Wuyuan Traditional Houses

The present paper takes Wuyuan traditional house as subject,and studies the main factors and their impacts on the indoor thermal environments of the house.The thermal design characteristics of Wuyuan traditional houses were obtained through a field survey.The characteristics of plan layout were presented as orientation and shading,patio,courtyard and stairway.The plan of Wuyan traditional house was classified into 6 basic and 7 combined types according to the changes of patio.The characteristics of envelope enclosure were introduced as vertical and horizontal ones.The thermal resistances of two common external rowlock walls with Chinese name of两平一侧and一眠一斗were calculated to be0.68~0.71 m2·K/W and 0.84~1.01 m2·K/W,respectively,and the thermal resistances of roof was obtained as 0.46 m2·K/W.We conducted a-year-long field measurements of indoor thermal environments on 4 traditional houses from various villages. The results show that the daily and annual temperature and humidity variations are smaller inside the houses than outside, and smaller in the bedrooms than the halls. The indoor temperature is lower for the house with more shading from other houses, and the indoor temperature changes more greatly with outdoors for the house with better ventilation. The indoor globe temperature was found to be always close to the air temperature.A thermal adaptive model was obtained based on the thermal comfort survey data in Hubei Province and Shanghai, and the model shows that inhabitants in the Hot Summer and Cold Summer zone of China can withstand less cold in winter and more heat in summer than those from US and Europe. We made thermal comfort assessments on the traditional houses by using the model, and the results show that the indoor thermal environments of houses are comfortable in most time of summer, and the low temperature problems in winter and transition seasons are the key point for further improvement. The houses with less shading and normal ventilation were found to have more comfortable hours in a year.We used DesignBuilder to analyze the impacts of patio form and external wall on indoor thermal environments of Wuyuan traditional houses. The simulations show that the indoor ventilation is better for 凹 and 一 types of plan, and then 回 type, and the plan without patio is worse. The indoor ventilation is better for 口+四 and worse for 回+一 and 回+回. The impact of indoor ventilation on improvement of indoor thermal environment is very limited in summer and negative in winter. The increase of external wall thermal resistance will increase summer comfortable hours and decrease spring and autumn comfortable hours, and result in an insignificant impact on annual comfortable hours. Finally, we proposed the predictive equations for indoor comfortable hours of Wuyuan traditional houses for practical applications, which are based on the thermal simulations of 36 real houses and multiple linear regressions.