Typical Residential Community Research Articles

Molecular Characteristics, Sources, and Health Risk Assessment of Gaseous Carbonyl Compounds in Residential Indoor and Outdoor Environments in a Megacity of Northwest China

Carbonyl compounds (CCs) in indoor air pose a significant threat to residents’ health and have garnered considerable attention in recent years. However, most studies have focused on low-molecular-weight carbonyl compounds (LMW-CCs) and have underestimated the impact of high-molecular-weight ones (HMW-CCs), causing a failure to comprehensively understand their effects on health. In this study, we analyzed twenty carbonyls in the indoor and outdoor air at typical residential communities in a megacity in Northwest China by using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with a photodiode array detector (DAD). The total concentration of indoor carbonyls was 1.4-3.4 times that of outdoor carbonyls. In addition, the concentration of indoor carbonyls was much higher during the heating season than that during the nonheating season. Conversely, the concentration of outdoor carbonyls was higher during the nonheating season than that during the heating season. The principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that indoor carbonyl pollution was primarily influenced by building materials, cooking fume, and wooden furniture. Formaldehyde exposure in indoor environments posed a greater health risk to children than acetaldehyde exposure. HMW-CCs were the primary contributors to indoor odor pollution, which was considered a significant cause of sick building syndrome (SBS). Our findings underscore the crucial role of HMW-CCs in indoor environments in exerting adverse impacts on health.

The Commuting Patterns and Health Effects among Urban Residents in Low-Visibility Air Pollution Environments: An Empirical Study of Gaoyou City, China

Low-visibility air pollution frequently occurs in the major cities of China and affects residents’ physical and mental health. This study, using Gaoyou City as a case study, selected 10 typical residential communities with different locations and types and conducted a questionnaire survey for two consecutive weeks to measure commuting behavior characteristics and health effects among residents in environments with different degrees of air pollution from November to December 2022. Concerning commuting distance, the average straight distance for short-distance commuting was 1.4 km, and the median commuting distance was 13.2 km. In air-polluted environments, residents’ commuting times were mainly concentrated within 1.5 h, with a majority taking 20 min to 30 min. The working and living spaces presented a circular core distribution pattern, with low-visibility air pollution significantly affecting the choice of commuting mode and having an indirect impact on health. The proportion of people who chose bus commuting significantly increased as air pollution changed from mild to moderate, whereas the proportion of people choosing slower commuting, such as walking, significantly decreased. While no significant fluctuations in physical health levels occurred, psychological health levels significantly decreased. In high air pollution environments, residents’ sleep quality, attitudes towards life, emotional states, and other assessed factors exhibited an inverted U-shaped correlation with commuting patterns. Low-visibility air pollution indirectly damaged the health of residents by affecting their commuting patterns, reducing their physical activity intensity and commuting options, and increasing their psychological stress and anxiety.

Energy consumption and heat island effect mitigation analysis of different roofs considering superposition coupling

Building energy, particularly air conditioning energy, makes for a significant fraction of overall societal energy usage. The heat island effect is a common urban environmental concern that threatens human sustainable development. Roofs, which cover more than 20% of the total metropolitan area, play an essential role in mitigating the urban heat island effect and lowering building energy use. To examine the triple beneficial benefits of cool roofs and green roofs on building energy conservation in different temperature zones in China, a simulation model based on a typical residential community is established. The results reveal that minimizing direct heat acquisition from the roof, reducing heat transfer from the enclosure, and enhancing the coefficient of performance have a surprising triple effect on building energy saving. In cold areas, hot summer and cold winter areas, and hot summer and warm winter areas, cool roofs may lower the regional ambient temperatures by 2°C, 2.3°C, and 2.6°C, respectively, whereas green roofs can reduce the regional ambient temperatures by 1°C, 1.1°C, and 1.2°C. The triple saving impact of cool roofs and green roofs may accomplish 11.0%, 11.5%, 12.6%, and 9.4%, 8.1%, and 9.3%, respectively, for building energy conservation. Because of the increased solar radiation, cool roofs perform better in low-latitude zones, whereas green roofs function consistently.

Microbial characteristics of domestic waste in a typical residential community of Shanghai

Microbial characteristics of domestic waste in a typical residential community of Shanghai

Porous media: A faster numerical simulation method applicable to real urban communities

The rapid development of cities worldwide and the expansion of a global economy have rendered climate change one of mankind's most severe challenges. The built environment has become a major focus for research into ways to reduce the climate effects of urban areas. Researchers who seek to model the performance of a large group of buildings, however, have available only complex simulation methods that require a massive amount of calculation if applied within an ordinary computer environment. Finding a simpler, more efficient modeling process would be a valuable contribution. This study selects a typical residential community as the simulation object, assigning boundary conditions derived from field measurements. A method of numerical simulation that treats buildings as porous media is applied to the area to simulate wind conditions. Results of the porous media method are compared with results from standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. Modeling results of the porous media method also are validated against physically measured data. Both validation methods indicate that the porous media method produces reliable results at a higher simulation efficiency. Compared with standard CFD method, in this study, the porous media method reduces the number of meshing grids by 27.8%, reduces the total iteration steps by 52.2% and reduces the total computational time by 66.7%. The porous media method is applicable to large-scale construction and intensive modeling, where it can effectively predict the wind environment at the initial planning stage.

Flexible Route Optimization for Demand-Responsive Public Transit Service

Traditional customized buses travel on fixed routes, which cannot satisfy passengers’ flexibility and convenience requirements. This paper studies a demand-responsive transit (DRT) service that can continuously adjust the path based on passengers’ dynamic demand. The path optimization model is established with more realistic constraints to create a bus travel plan within a specified area, and the model not only considers the preferred time windows of passengers but also maximizes the benefits of the system. Based on simulated annealing, a dynamic genetic algorithm is designed to generate the static initial travel path, and the dynamic travel path is continuously updated to satisfy the real-time demand. To evaluate the proposed model and algorithm, a case study in a typical residential community of Beijing, China, is conducted based on transit smart card records. According to the case study results, the convenience, travel time, and economic and environmental benefits of the DRT service are assessed via comparison with traditional buses and private cars. The analysis results demonstrate the feasibility and significance of the method, and it can be used by transit planners to design a superior DRT service.

Study on the sediment characteristics of the snow in a typical residential community and its integrated biological treatment pattern in Harbin.

Winter cities have severe shortages of water resources. The effective classification and recycling of urban water resources that are available here are therefore significant for the sustainable utilization of water in winter cities, and snow is a potential water resource. In this research, the water quality of the snow and the pollutant composition in the vehicle roads of a typical residential community of Harbin are analyzed. It is concluded that there is a large amount of suspended substances, including chemical oxygen demand (COD), salt, ammonia, and oil in this snow. There are 27 main pollutants. The oily substances are dominated by hexadecane and are accompanied by toxic substances, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene (BTEX), and naphthalene. As snow is a carrier of pollutants, the underground space of the urban shallow green belt is proposed to be used to establish a snow-melting system that would integrate biological treatment devices. This method allows the year-round collection, storage, and utilization of rainwater for use in city planning and municipal technology, realizing multiple objectives and having a significant influence on further urban development.

Analysis of social vulnerability of residential community to hazards in Tianjin, China

The residential community is the basic unit of a city. The evaluation of community-based social vulnerability to hazards plays a vital role in improving urban disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities and enhances nationwide comprehensive disaster management. In this study, five social vulnerability indicators indexes (social network, community administration, community participation, community disaster prevention, and social support) are selected to build a community-based social vulnerability index (SoVI). Next, an Analytic Hierarchy Process-Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (AHP-TOPSIS) mathematical model is developed to access the community-based social vulnerability. Three typical residential communities in Tianjin are selected as study sites, and field investigations are conducted. The results indicate that relationships among residents, cooperation, and collective action are effective factors in all three communities and that each community has particular factors influencing its vulnerability characteristics. According to the results, a series of targeted advice and measures is proposed for each community, which could be helpful for policy makers and hazard managers.

GIS-based Dimensionless Assessment of Distributed Rooftop PV in Chinese Residential Communities

For the purpose of applicable regional assessment of the residential roof-mounted PV, a di-mensionless estimation based on the multi-criteria database is carried out in this paper. With Energy-Economic-Environment relevant factors incorporated in GIS, a dimensionless index was protocoled as the regional substitution rates of distributed rooftop PV (RSR-DRPV) for typical residential communities. This model reveals the potential quantitatively and spatially in forms of queryable interpolated GIS mappings, considering both supply and demand sides. Results indicated that the distribution of urban RSR-DRPV was in accord with that of solar resources. However, the rural RSR-DPVR tended to be equally distributed in China mainland, except for the eastern coastal regions with higher ranges. Policy implications were also given regarding quantitative magnitude and subsidy levels. This evaluation was conducted at community scale, and it can be taken as reference when establishing located subsidy levels for urban and rural areas respectively at planning stage.

A Configurable $\mu $ VPP With Managed Energy Services: A Malmo Western Harbour Case

This paper describes an exemplar precommercial micro virtual power plant ( $\mu $ VPP) that has been successfully commissioned and operating since July 2014 in Malmo, Sweden. The embedded home energy management system concurrently manages downstream assets within a typical residential community of multiple apartments and delivers different energy services that benefit both end-users and system operators. A fuzzy logic-based generic algorithm is developed to accommodate different types of services with the appreciation of system constraints. Each managed energy service is demonstrated in terms of its function, the level of utilization for asset capacity, and the economic benefit to participants. It addresses the viability of mass-market promotion for this $\mu $ VPP by establishing a detailed business model for all participants in the energy portfolio.

Field Experiments and Investigation of Outdoor Human Thermal Sensation in a Typical Residential Community in Hot-Humid Climate

Field Experiments and Investigation of Outdoor Human Thermal Sensation in a Typical Residential Community in Hot-Humid Climate

Combining smart card data and household travel survey to analyze jobs–housing relationships in Beijing

Location Based Services (LBS) provide a new perspective for spatiotemporally analyzing dynamic urban systems. Research has investigated urban dynamics using LBS. However, less attention has been paid to the analysis of urban structure (especially commuting pattern) using smart card data (SCD), which are widely available in most large cities in China, and even in the world. This paper combines bus SCD for a one-week period with a oneday household travel survey, as well as a parcel-level land use map to identify job–housing locations and commuting trip routes in Beijing. Two data forms are proposed, one for jobs–housing identification and the other for commuting trip route identification. The results of the identification are aggregated in the bus stop and traffic analysis zone (TAZ) scales, respectively. Particularly, commuting trips from three typical residential communities to six main business zones are mapped and compared to analyze commuting patterns in Beijing. The identified commuting trips are validated by comparison with those from the survey in terms of commuting time and distance, and the positive validation results prove the applicability of our approach. Our experiment, as a first step toward enriching LBS data using conventional survey and urban GIS data, can obtain solid identification results based on rules extracted from existing surveys or censuses.

A Discussion on the Energy Saving Waterscapes in City’s Residential Communities

The waterscapes are indeed playing an important role in developing the quality of life in residential communities, but the cost is huge and can’t be overlooked. The research turned out to suggest that people should make full use of the various resources while building a waterscape. Now some typical residential communities in Tongren, Guizhou will be taken as the subjects of the research so as to find out the problems and 28put forth some concrete solutions.

Environmental noise impact of natural-draft hyperbolic cooling towers

Site planning and environmental regulations may require evaluation of the environmental impact of alternate cooling methods for electric power generating stations. One alternate cooling method utilizes natural draft hyperbolic cooling towers. A study of the noise emissions from both crossflow and counterflow natural-draft hyperbolic cooling towers was undertaken as the initial phase in evaluating the potential environmental noise impact. Measured data are in substantial agreement with published noise prediction schemes [R. M. Ellis, J. Sound Vib. 14, No. 2, 171–182 (1971)]. Results of this study suggest a simplified noise prediction scheme. Accuracy of this new scheme is verified by field data. This paper compares measured and estimated noise emissions from natural-draft hyperbolic cooling towers with typical residential community noise levels. The potential impact in surrounding communities from broad-band noise emitted by natural-draft hyperbolic cooling towers is evaluated by common indices such as environmental regulations and published psychoacoustic rating methods.