Advances in research for underground buildings: Energy, thermal comfort and indoor air quality

Abstract

Underground spaces have received increasing attention in the past decades owing to the growing urban land scarcity. Underground spaces can have a variety of functions such as storage, shelter, and civic infrastructures, while underground buildings for human activities have gained less attention mostly due to the challenges in creating suitable living and working environments. With the attempt to design a healthy, comfortable and energy efficient underground building, this paper conducts a comprehensive review on the studies related to energy, thermal comfort and indoor air quality performances of underground buildings, ranging from prediction methods to influential factors to improving solutions. The review reveals that numerical simulation is mostly used to study underground building energy performance while field experimentation is primarily employed for investigating underground building indoor environment quality performance. Finite difference method is found to be the most adopted numerical method to predict the energy performance of underground buildings. Inherent uncertainty issues in ground coupled heat transfer still need to be improved to reflect more physics and balance prediction accuracy with computational cost. Further research is more necessary and crucial in the field of indoor environment quality performance than energy efficiency performance for underground buildings.