Study on the thermal performance and wind environment in a residential community

•Thermal performance and wind environment in a community is experimentally studied.•Optimization on architectural layout is conducted according to numerical results.•Comparison analysis of experimental and numerical results is presented.

In situ measurements are conducted on the thermal performance and wind environment in a residential community. The relationship between the community thermal performance and the tested parameters including the air temperature, relative humidity, underlying surface temperature is also presented. The results indicate that the lawns and tree shade in the community help to reduce the ambient temperature and enhance the relative humidity which means that the green ratio of a building cluster makes a significant contribution to the thermal performance. Furthermore, a numerical simulation is performed with the experimental results as the boundary conditions to get the airflow field and pressure field of the whole community to improve the architectural layout. The numerical results indicate that staggered arrangement of the building groups seems to be more beneficial to eliminating the laneway wind effects compared to aligned arrangement.