Reducing Urban Thermal Discomfort by Int
Reducing Urban Thermal Discomfort by Int
Reducing Urban Thermal Discomfort by Int
1. Introduction
More than 50% of the world’s population is living in cities [1]. Thus, cities are the most sig-
nificant energy users in the world. At least 60 to 80 percent of the world’s energy consumption
is in the urban environment [2]. Therefore, energy-consuming such as fuel energy and elec-
tricity consumption can produce heat, and this effect would enhance the temperature of cities,
which causes local or even global warming. In addition, using huge scale glazing of building
surfaces, wide surfaces of asphalt all over the cities, and very low areas of vegetation would
create a warmer area than suburbs. That is why bringing sustainability to the cities is one of
the most important actions that need to be considered by urbanism.
2. Literature Review
In 1810, Urban Heat Island (UHI) concept was introduced by Luke Howard, a British scien-
tist, as a phenomenon in metropolises, such as London [3]. Rapid city development, which is
caused by industrialization, has a substantial negative effect on the urban environment. Cities’
new conditions caused urban planners to consider the root of problems, such as high density
and pollution. After defining the outlines of these problems in developed cities, researchers
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Figure 1. Urban Heat Island: Study on the Application of Ventilation Corridor Planning in
Urban New Area: A Case Study of Xixian New Area.” Su, et al. P: 2.
In 2005, Solecki tried to analyze the role of urban vegetation and reflective roofs on reduc-
ing UHI utilizing the CITYgreen application. He found that urban vegetation has a significant
effect on mitigating UHI; however, he believed high-density neighborhoods have limited open
spaces for vegetation, and those neighborhoods have low open spaces for a wind flow [15]. In
2015, O’Malley used ENVI-met to analyze various mitigation strategies, such as vegetation
and water surface on mitigation UHI. He used the resiliency term in his research and consid-
ered it as a measurement tool for measuring the effectiveness of those strategies. He provided
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Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
In 2019, He studied the effect of road angle and pattern on the air velocity and airflow
direction in a high-density neighborhood (Figure 3). He realized that road pattern in a city
like New York has a massive effect on directing air to the urban context. He used numerical
and experimental methods for his study and compared the results to show the accuracy of the
numerical analysis. His models considered four types of four-way roads with various patterns
from 45 to 90 angles. The study results show that the road direction should be close to the
natural air direction to simplify the airflow in the context. He used CFD simulation for this
study, and it is one of the most recent CFD simulations for UVC.
4. Summary
The literature shows the importance of UHI mitigation in controlling the climate change effect,
especially for metropolitans [14]. Nevertheless, there are many gaps in the field that need to
go under consideration and research. For example, UVC and the effect of road pattern and
angle is a relatively new field of study that has a great potential to expand, especially when
considering different urban contexts in a different culture.
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References
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