Building neighborhood emerging properties and their impacts on multi-scale modeling of building energy and airflows

Abstract

This paper provides a critical review on the building neighborhood properties influencing the energy and airflows in urban neighborhoods. Specifically, the review focus is on the multi-scale modeling required to quantify this influence of the building neighborhood properties on the energy consumption in buildings. The energy consumption patterns of buildings located in dense city centers are highly dependent on the surrounding urban neighborhood, compared to the low density, suburban/rural regions, where the building energy consumption patterns are similar to an isolated building energy consumption patterns. Due to the complex nature of the outdoor airflow around the buildings in urban neighborhoods, a practical modeling approach utilizes multi-scale modeling to account for different spatial and temporal scales for the relevant transport processes. Specifically, this modeling approach aims to identify the most important neighborhood properties influencing building energy consumption. The urban morphology parameters, such as the urban plan area density, frontal area density, and mean height of the buildings represent successful examples of emerging properties suitable for development of generalized solutions and physical models at the neighborhood scale. This paper also reviews different modeling approaches that account for the impacts of the urban neighborhood properties on the thermo-fluid property of the air, surfaces, and sky in the built environment as the required inputs for accurate assessment of building energy consumption. Furthermore, these emerging properties of urban neighborhoods directly affect (1) the mitigation strategies for a better adaptation, (2) design performance metrics of neighborhoods for the green building rating systems, and (3) socio-environmental factors.