Experimental Measurement on the Thermal Environment of the Sidewalk

Abstract

The effect of street trees on cooling and humidifying can adjust the building microclimate and improve the outdoor thermal environment so as to improve the comfort of human body. In order to study the influence of street trees on the thermal environment of sidewalks, this paper selected the sidewalk of a university campus in Guangzhou for experimental measurement. In this paper, the field measurements include outdoor air temperature, wet bulb temperature, black globe temperature, wind velocity, and ground temperature. The result shows that thermal environment of the sidewalk is related to the trend of street trees and Sky View Factor (SVF). The variation of air temperature between southwest and northeast is more stable than that of east-west sidewalk, the difference between them is below 1 °C, the relative humidity of air is higher than that of east-west, and the minimum difference between them is significant at high shading rate, which can reach 10 °C. The time of receiving solar radiation is shorter than that of east-west direction, and the time of black sphere temperature above 35 °C is reduced by 1–1.5 h. The influence of sky angle coefficient on the thermal environment of sidewalk is as follows: the value of SVF is positively correlated with air temperature and black sphere temperature, but negatively correlated with relative humidity.