JiSMART2021—037: Comparative Analysis of the Thermal Environment in Dense Urban Settings

Abstract

The acceleration of urbanization leads to denser building groups, and more solar radiation will be absorbed by the surrounding urban surfaces, and many urban thermal environment problems occur represented by the urban heat island. Retro-reflective facades (RR-facades) were proposed to reflect solar radiation along the incident radiation and had gradually attracted much attention due to their unique reflection characteristics. Based on this, we designed the RR-pattern facades such that each unit cell of the pattern was a cubic-corner retro-reflector consisting of three mutually perpendicular plane surfaces by using shadow elements in the software of Energyplus. Meanwhile, general facades were introduced as the comparison. And we conducted external surface temperature simulation of building networks in order to examine their thermal environment. We found that building surface temperatures dropped considerably, especially in 1 p.m. of a day when the solar radiation was the highest.