A Review on the Impact of Outdoor Environment on Indoor Thermal Environment

Abstract

Outdoor environment exchanges heat with indoor environment, enabling pollutants to infiltrate indoors, affecting buildings’ energy efficiency, comfort, and indoor air quality. Investigating the impact of the outdoor environment on the indoor thermal environment is crucial. Firstly, this paper reviews the coupling method to link the outdoor environment with the indoor environment. Secondly, it examines the impact of the outdoor physical environment, including neighboring buildings, greening, road surface, water body, and sky, on the indoor thermal environment. During the hottest summer, an increase of 17% in trees can reduce indoor temperature by 1.1 °C. Thirdly, the impact of weather conditions, including outdoor temperature, outdoor humidity, external wind, global warming, extreme weather conditions, and solar radiation, on the indoor thermal environment is studied. Due to global warming, cooling energy consumption and heating energy consumption in 2050 could increase by 223% to 1050%, and heating demand could decrease by 36% to 58%. Finally, the impact of outdoor air pollution on indoor environment and energy consumption is analyzed. For every 75 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 concentration, average power consumption could increase by 11.2%. Recommendations for future research are provided. This study contributes to the understanding of the outdoor–indoor thermal relationship and offers insights into enhancing indoor thermal comfort and reducing building energy consumption.

Reengineering Indoor Air Quality Monitoring Systems to Improve End-User Experience

“…The outdoor environment significantly impacts the indoor environment, both thermally and in terms of air quality, as described in [ 33 ]. This interaction affects a building’s energy efficiency, comfort, and indoor air quality.…”

Simplified Simulation Method of Diffusers for Indoor Non-Uniform Temperature Distribution: A Case Study in Shanghai

“…In terms of design and control strategy optimization of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, indoor temperature is usually considered uniformly distributed. Actually, the indoor temperature is non-uniform and affected by dynamic outdoor environments [1], non-uniform internal load distribution [2], and varying indoor airflow patterns [3]. Meanwhile, with the increasing requirements of personal thermal comfort, the thermal comfort of the human-centered micro-environment is more important than that for the whole room [4,5].…”

“…From the above review, it is clear that the previous CFD studies of various simplified models still have several shortcomings: (1) Most of these studies considered the diffuser velocity as an even velocity based on the fully open area [28,29], simplifying or even ignoring the advection effect of diffusers. In practice the outflow from the diffuser is nonuniform and complex due to turbulent air flow and depends on the geometry characteristics of the diffuser.…”