Building form and outdoor thermal comfort: Inverse design the microclimate of outdoor space for a kindergarten

Thermally comfortable mircoclimate is essential for creating high-quality outdoor spaces that attract citizens and boost city vitality. Previous design efforts to improve outdoor thermal comfort were usually conducted at large scales, such as city scale, neighborhood scale, urban block scale. Few researchers focused on the building scale. This study proposes an optimization framework based on genetic algorithm to determine the building shape, orientation, and location during early design stage that reduces the overall thermal stress in the target outdoor space. Solar radiation and wind fields were simulated to obtain the outdoor Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) as the performance indicator. The simulations were validated against the experimental data. This investigation applied the proposed optimization framework to design the outdoor space for a kindergarten under the climate of Tianjin and Shanghai, respectively. The results showed that optimization reduced the overall thermal stress. The most favourable kindergarten forms were suggested through optimization. Moreover, solar radiation has been proved to contribute more to outdoor thermal comfort than wind field and heat stress is more important than cold stress during optimization. This study supplements the inverse design of outdoor thermal comfort at building scale and provides suggestions to create comfortable urban outdoor spaces.