Research Of Living Environment And Energy Saving Potential In Rural Tibetan Residences Under Region Adaptability

With consideration of the region and religious factors, Tibetan local-style dwelling house has experienced the vicissitudes of history and become an important part of Chinese residences buildings. As a landmark in Tibetan region, the unique building form still exists, reflecting wisdom of ethnic architecture. The objective of this paper is to investigate the current situation of Tibetan wooden residential dwelling. On the basis of field interviews and researches, the characteristics of the traditional houses are summarized such as environmental suitability, humanistic environment and architectural features for new ecological rural Tibetan residences under sustainable development, realizing the basic principle of protection, utilization and providing research information for improving the living environment.Thermal environment conditions are analyzed based on the field measurements of indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity of a typical Tibetan traditional dwelling in a village of Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu province in winter and summer. Results show that the combination of local factors such as history, geography, climate, the unique local-style dwelling houses building structure and monomer structure has formed. The structure of traditional Tibetan dwelling has a good thermal performance in some aspects. Passive manners should be used in building thermal environment constructions. Further improvement for indoor thermal comfort conditions through comprehensive and energy-saving heating methods are needed.The current thermal environment of local-style dwelling houses is researched. Considering the local architectural style and folk customs, several methods of energy conservation projects such as building renovation, wall insulations on outer brick wall, changing window-wall ratio and the type of the south windows, using additional southern sunspace are designed and simulated by DeST-h. All kinds of measures are evaluated by the effect of reducing energy consumption respectively. Comprehensive energy-saving building renovations are proposed to reduce energy consumption and improve indoor thermal comfort of Tibetan residential in cold areas. Results show that with respect to the Tibetan residential energy consumption benchmark, Energy saving rate is 22.04% and 14.69% respectively after adding 60 mm and 40 mm EPS insulation to south-facing brick walls and flue; Increasing window-wall ratio combined with insulated glass, changing the thickness of the rammed earth wall and sunspace can significantly reduce energy consumption with energy saving rate of 17.62%, 26.32%, 22.80% respectively. Comprehensive measures can achieve the overall energy saving rate of 61.4%. It is verified as an effective practical implication of renovations in such residential house.