Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

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Building form and outdoor thermal comfort: Inverse design the

microclimate of outdoor space for a kindergarten
Rui Sun a, Junjie Liu b, Dayi Lai a,⇑, Wei Liu c,⇑
a
Department of Architecture, School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
b
Tianjin Key Laboratory of Indoor Air Environmental Quality Control, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
c
Division of Sustainable Buildings, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Brinellvägen 23, Stockholm 100 44, Sweden

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Thermally comfortable mircoclimate is essential for creating high-quality outdoor spaces that attract cit-
Received 13 October 2022 izens and boost city vitality. Previous design efforts to improve outdoor thermal comfort were usually
Revised 29 December 2022 conducted at large scales, such as city scale, neighborhood scale, urban block scale. Few researchers
Accepted 23 January 2023
focused on the building scale. This study proposes an optimization framework based on genetic algorithm
Available online 2 February 2023
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
Keywords:
obtain the outdoor Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) as the performance indicator. The simulations
Genetic algorithm
Radiation
were validated against the experimental data. This investigation applied the proposed optimization
Wind framework to design the outdoor space for a kindergarten under the climate of Tianjin and Shanghai,
CFD respectively. The results showed that optimization reduced the overall thermal stress. The most favour-
UTCI able kindergarten forms were suggested through optimization. Moreover, solar radiation has been proved
Thermal stress 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.
Ó 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

1. Introduction
Cities, as important centers for human social and economic
activities [62], are expected to accommodate almost 70% of the glo-
bal population by 2050. Under rapid urbanization, it is crucial to
vitalize urban outdoor spaces because these places provide essen-
tial places for the everyday lives of citizens. Encouraging citizens to
participate in outdoor activities also reduces the usages of air con-
ditioners and other electronic equipment [40], increases revenue
from outdoor commercial and recreational activities [28], and pro-
motes their physical and mental health [53]. Thus, it is essential to
design high-quality outdoor spaces to attract people to the out-
doors. A thermally comfortable microclimate is fundamental to a
high-quality outdoor space [34], as increased vitality was usually
observed under better microclimate [22]. Thus, it is necessary to
take microclimate into consideration when designing urban out-
door spaces.
Physically speaking, air temperature, solar radiation, wind
speed, and humidity are four basic parameters of microclimate that
⇑ Corresponding authors.
E-mail addresses: dayi_lai@sjtu.edu.cn (D. Lai), weiliu2@kth.se (W. Liu).
influence human thermal comfort in outdoor spaces [41]. While air
temperature and humidity are greatly determined by the diurnal
and seasonal changes of local weather and usually have limited
spatial variation, the distributions of solar radiation and wind
speed can be largely affected by the urban geometry. For example,
buildings alter shortwave solar radiation and change radiative heat
gain on human body [46]. In addition to solar radiation, wind can
be accelerated at the windward region and decelerated at the wake
region of a building [10]. The effects of urban geometry on micro-
climate can be conducted at different scales, as Table 1 illustrates
[46,3].
Among all the scales listed in Table 1, outdoor thermal comfort
studies were always conducted at large scales like city scale, neigh-
bourhood scale, urban block scale and street canyon scale. Few
studies paid attention to the building scale. In fact, the current
building scale researches were mainly focused on indoor thermal
comfort [63,64]but not outdoor microclimate, and the few remain-
ing outdoor thermal comfort researches yield obvious limitations.
Anisha et al. [36] investigated effects of building forms on microcli-
mate in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but considered just four simple and
fundamental forms. Beta et al. [47] compared the microclimate of
five low-cost apartments with different building form and config-

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2023.112824
0378-7788/Ó 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
Table 1
Analysis scales in outdoor thermal comfort studies.
Scales Research objects
City scale Whole city
Neighbour- hood scale Urban landscape with a degree of homogeneity (e.g.
heavy industrial, high-density residential areas, etc.)
Urban block scale Urban unit delineated by the principal road network
(Several urban blocks form neighbourhoods.)
Street canyon scale Geometric form created by a street with its three facets
Building scale One or several buildings located on a target site
urations in Bandung, Indonesia, but only three building forms were
studied. To fully explore the effect of building forms on outdoor
thermal comfort, a series of design scenarios for various building
forms should be considered.
In order to consider more design scenarios, computational opti-
mization that features automatically generating a series of design
solutions is a useful and effective tool. In the last few years, several
attempts have been made to apply computational optimization to
the design of outdoor microclimate for realizing optimum thermal
comfort, these attempts are very effective but still have a lot of lim-
itations. Taleb et al. [54] optimized the form and orientation of a
building cluster to achieve the optimum solar radiation and urban
ventilation, respectively. Kaseb et al. [37] proposed a CFD-based
evolutionary framework to optimize building heights and plan area
densities to improve ventilation in complex real urban areas. These
studies only considered the effect of solar radiation or wind. To
account for the comprehensive effect of the four environmental
parameters on outdoor thermal comfort, Bajsanski et al. [7] and
Ibrahim et al. [33] used an integrated index Universal Thermal Cli-
mate Index (UTCI) in the objective function when optimizing lay-
outs of urban blocks. But they just simulated radiation field and
the assumption that the wind speed of the urban area was uniform
may bring unknown inaccuracy. Xu et al. [61,60] simulated both
solar radiation and wind field but failed to precisely consider the
impact of surrounding buildings. In addition, the above investiga-
tions only focused on either summer or winter and did not con-
sider overall seasonal variations. Considering the seasonal
changes throughout a year, a design that improves thermal com-
fort in summer may cause discomfort in winter and vice versa.
Also, none of these optimization studies was conducted at building
scale. Therefore, the research aim and objectives are as follows:

Propose a framework that inversely design the form of buildings
with the objective to optimize outdoor microclimate at building
scale.

Consider the effect of both surrounding buildings and seasonal
changes in this framework.

Validate the numerical simulations of solar radiation and wind
field in the framework against experimental data.

Apply the proposed inverse design framework to design the
outdoor space of a kindergarten for demonstration.
2. Methods
This section first introduces the framework for outdoor micro-
climate optimization. Then, the simulations of solar radiation and
wind speed were validated by comparing with experimental data.
2
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
Research topics
The difference of climatic phenomena between cities and their rural environment
[38,51,39]
The impact of urban geometry features,
such as building density, configuration,
aspect ratio, sky view factor and so on,
on outdoor thermal comfort
[55,29]
[15,1]
[4]
The effect of street canyon features like height-to-width ratio, canyon orientation,
etc., on local microclimate [23,2,14]
The impact of building form, including shape, height, orientation and location of
the target building, etc., on the microclimate of its outdoor space [36,47]
2.1. Framework for outdoor microclimate optimization
Fig. 1 illustrates the overall framework of the outdoor microcli-
mate optimization, which consists of four parts: background input,
microclimate simulation, performance evaluation, and genetic
algorithm. The background input drives the microclimate simula-
tion, the performance is evaluated according to the simulation
results, and the optimization process efficiently searches for a set
of design variables that achieve the best performance. The simula-
tion and optimization were conducted in the Rhino – Grasshopper
parametric modeling platform with the use of plug-ins such as
Ladybug, Butterfly, and Galapagos [50]. Details of the simulation
and optimization processes are covered in the following sections.
2.1.1. Background input
The background information can be categorized into morpho-
logical and meteorological inputs. The morphological inputs
include the geometric features of the target building and surround-
ings. The morphological features of the target building, including
building location, shape, height, orientation, etc., can be refined
into design variables. While setting up the design variables, con-
straints from building codes or actual demands are required to pro-
vide reasonable restrictions. To consider the influence of
surrounding buildings on local microclimate, appropriate propor-
tion needs to be suggested to get reliable results without compro-
mising the computational accuracy. According to Liu et al. [43],
detailed building structures around the target space within a
radius of at least 3L (L is the maximum dimension of the target
space) are modeled. Meteorological data are also necessary inputs
because they provide boundary conditions to drive the microcli-
mate simulation.
2.1.2. Microclimate simulation
This study simulates the wind speed and radiation fields. Then
the wind speed and radiation fields are combined with air temper-
ature and humidity from weather data file for the evaluation of
outdoor thermal comfort. The followings show the details of solar
radiation and wind speed calculations.
2.1.2.1. Calculation of solar radiation field. This study uses mean
radiant temperature (T mrt ) to denote the solar radiation field. T mrt
is not only a comprehensive variable integrating the long wave
and short wave radiant components, but also a significant param-
eters governing the energy balance and the thermal comfort of the
human body [16]. Ladybug plug-in in Grasshopper calculates T mrt
as addition of both long wave and short wave heat exchange. The
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
Fig. 1. Framework to optimize the outdoor microclimate.
long wave part (T mrt;long wav e ) is estimated using the MENEX model
[8] as follows:
0:25
Ihor
T mrt;long wav e ¼ f svv ð Þ  273:15
raLW
where f svv represents the sky view factor from a certain point unob-
structed by opaque surfaces. Ihor (W/mm2) is the horizontal infrared
radiation intensity obtained from the weather file. r is the Stephan
Boltzmann constant (5.667108 W/m2k4), aLW is the long wave
absorptivity. As for the short wave solar radiation, the Solarcal
model proposed by Arns et al. [5] is employed to calculate short
wave part of T mrt (T mrt;short wav e ) as follows:
aSW
T mrt;short wav e ¼ ½ð0:5f eff f svv ÞðIhor Rfloor þ Idiff Þ
aLW f eff hr
þ ðf p f eff Idir Þ þ T a
where f eff is the fraction of the body exposed to solar radiation and
hr is the radiation heat transfer coefficient (W/m2K). aSW is short
wave absorptivity. Idiff and Idir are respectively the diffused and
direct normal radiation. Rfloor is the floor reflectance and f p is the
projected area factor of the body. The detailed explanation of Eq.
2 can be found in Ref. [5]. According to ASHRAE standard 55 [6],
f eff was set to 0.725 to indicate a standing person, hr was
6.012 W/m2 K, aSW was 0.7 for brown skin and medium clothing,
aLW was 0.95, and Rfloor was 0.25 in this study.
2.1.2.2. Calculation of wind speed. This study uses the Grasshopper
plug-in Butterfly that relies on the open-source computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) engine OpenFOAM [58] to simulate the wind
field. According to the guidelines for CFD simulation of urban wind
conditions [20,56], the height of the domain, the upstream domain
size, and the lateral size were 6H (H is the maximum height of the
involved buildings), and the downwind domain size was 15H. The
Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) conditions of mean wind speed
U, turbulent kinetic energy k, and turbulent dissipation rate e are
prescribed at the inlet as [49]:
U ref z þ z0
UðzÞ ¼ ln
j z0
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
U 2ref
kðzÞ ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffi ð4Þ
Cl
ð1Þ U 3ref
eðzÞ ¼ ð5Þ
jðz þ z0 Þ
where z0 is the aerodynamic roughness length and different for var-
ious terrains [25]. In this study, z0 was set to 1.0 to represent den-
sely build-up area. z is the height coordinate, Uref is the reference
wind speed at z = 10 m, j = 0.42 is the von Karman constant,
and C l =0.09 is the turbulence model constant.
For outdoor wind speed simulation, the zero static gauge pres-
sure is imposed at the outlet and symmetry conditions are applied
at the top and lateral sides. The standard wall functions and the
roughness modification [21] are used for the ground surface and
ð2Þ the building walls. Then, BlockMesh and SnappyHexMesh tools in
OpenFOAM are utilized together to generate mesh. The k-e turbu-
lence model [10] based on the Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes
(RANS) Equations is used for CFD calculation and convergence is
obtained when all the scaled residuals reach a minimum of 106 .
2.1.3. Performance evaluation
This study employs UTCI that based on Fiala multi-node human
thermoregulation model [19] to evaluate the outdoor thermal
comfort. UTCI is claimed to be applicable to a wide range of cli-
mates and locations [9] and the calculation of UTCI requires four
input parameters: T a ; T mrt , relative humidity(RH) and U ref . Among
the four parameters, T a and RH can be obtained from Energy Plus
Weather (EPW) weather file while the distributions of T mrt and U
at z meters are calculated according to Section 2.1.2. U can be con-
verted to U ref using Eq. 6:
10
log 0:01
U ref ¼ U ð6Þ
z
log 0:01
The resulted UTCI is categorized into 10 thermal stress levels and
the level of 9–26 °C is considered as no thermal stress. The stronger
the thermal stress, the further UTCI is away from 9–26 °C. The ther-
mal stress at time point m and spatial grid n is defined as the dis-
ð3Þ
tance from the no thermal stress range 9–26 °C:
3
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

Table 2
Daily average of input meteorological parameters.

Date 08/13/2018 10/24/2018 02/28/2019 05/13/2019

T a (°C) 33.75 17.44 11.41 23.00
Idir (W/m2) 548.45 641.92 328.61 383.24
Idiff (W/m2) 79.48 54.20 28.96 54.84
Ihor (W/m2) 447.12 340.71 280.3 381.50
Sky condition Cloudy Sunny Sunny Sunny

Fig. 2. Comparison between simulated and measured T mrt on the four measured dates: (a) A time-series plot, and (b) A scatter plot.

Fig. 3. (a) Building configuration and (b) Measurement points of the experiment.

4
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

Fig. 4. Comparisons between simulated and measured wind velocity along vertical lines at: (a) x=H ¼ 1:4, (b) x=H ¼ 1:0, (c) x=H ¼ 0:6, (d) x=H ¼ 1:4, (e) x=H ¼ 1:0, (f)
x=H ¼ 0:6 at y=H ¼ 0.

8 m
< UTCIn  26; if UTCI > 26
> generations or a maximum of 15 generations are performed. In this
TSm ¼ 0; if 9 6 UTCI 6 26 ð7Þ study, the size of the initial population was 30 individuals and the
n
>
: size of other generations was 10 individuals. In every evolutionary
9  UTCIm
n; if UTCI < 9
period, 20% of all individuals were selected. Then, Blend Crossover
The objective of outdoor microclimate optimization is to reduce the [17] and Point Mutation[26] were employed to produce new
overall thermal stress in the target outdoor space at specified times. individuals.
With the thermal stress in Eq. 7, the objective function (OF) is
defined as the mean of the spatial and temporal thermal stress in 2.2. Validation of the solar radiation and wind speed simulations
Eq. 8:
Although numerical modelling offers flexibility, it entails uncer-
X
m X
n
TSji tainties due to many approximations used. Therefore, it is neces-
j¼1 i¼1 sary to validate the numerical simulations. The following details
OF ¼ ð8Þ
mn the validation of solar radiation and wind simulations by compar-
ing the simulated results with the experimental data.
2.1.4. Genetic algorithm
2.2.1. Solar radiation
This investigation uses genetic algorithm based on Galapagos
In order to provide experimental data for the validation of solar
plug-in in Grasshopper to identify the design variables of mini-
radiation simulation, this study measured T mrt in the center of a
mum OF. Genetic algorithm is effective for finding the global opti-
mal condition and can efficiently reduce the total number of
iterations needed to reach one or more optimal solutions [44]. As Table 3
shown in Fig. 1, the first step of genetic algorithm generates a set The layout and surroundings of investigated kindergartens
of random initial design variables for the individuals in the first Number of buildings Percentage (%)
population. Then, with background inputs, simulations are con-
One 66.1
ducted to evaluate the performance by determining the OF or so- Two 18.2
called fitness value for each individual. The genetic algorithm con- Three 8.3
ducts selection, crossover, and mutation on the design variables of Four and more 7.4
individuals by using the objective function in the current genera- Surroundings Percentage (%)
High-density residential area 85.8
tion to generate a new population. The optimization process stops
Low-density open crossroads 14.2
when the optimal individual stays the same for five consecutive
5
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
six-story courtyard of a building in Tianjin University, China. In
order to cover different seasons and meteorological conditions,
measurements were conducted on August 13, 2018, October 24,
2018, February 28, 2019 and May 13, 2019. To avoid the rainy peri-
ods, measurements on August 13, 2018 was conducted from 10:00
a.m. to 15:00 p.m. The rest three measurements were performed
from 8:00 a.m. to 15:00 p.m. The six-directional (upward, down-
ward, east, south, west, north) short wave and long wave solar
radiations were measured by short wave radiometer Kipp&Zonen
and long wave radiometer CNR4 at the height of 1.1 m. With the
measured short and long wave solar radiation intensities from
six directions, the T mrt was calculated via the following equation
[30]:
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
4 Sstr
T mrt ¼  273:15 ð9Þ
ep r
X
6 X
6 = 0.1 m. The reference inlet velocity measured at H was
Sstr ¼ ak K i F i þ ep Li F i ð10Þ
i¼1 i¼1
where Sstr (W/m2) is the mean radiant flux intensity of the human
body, ep = 0.97 is the emissivity of the human body, and ak = 0.7 is
short wave absorptivity. K i and Li are the short and long wave radi-
ation intensities, respectively. The angle factors F i are set to 0.22 for
radiant fluxes from the east, west, south and north, and 0.06 for
upward and downward radiant fluxes. The meteorological data
from the nearest meteorological station, including the T a ; Idir ; Idiff ,
and Ihor , was used to drive the simulation. The time-averaged mete-
orological parameters are shown in Table 2.
Fig. 5. Classification of the investigated kindergartens based on building forms.
6
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
Fig. 2 compares the simulated and measured T mrt and the sim-
ulation accurately reflected the variation of the measurement with
a R2 of 0.979. Also, compared with previous studies [18,33], the
error between the simulated and measured data was acceptable
with RMSE (root mean square error) of 3.098 K and MBE (mean
bias error) of 2.090 K. Hence the accuracy of Ladybug tool to
model the T mrt was validated.
2.2.2. Wind speed
To validate the wind speed simulation, we used the experimen-
tal data from Case 1H by Tominaga et al. [57]. As shown in Fig. 3,
Tominaga et al. [57] provided a dataset of the three-dimensional
(3D) turbulent flow over nine identical cubic buildings in an ABL
wind tunnel. The width, depth and height of each building and
the distance between all the buildings were all equal to H
U H = 3.1 m/s. The simulated and measured wind velocity was com-
pared along the y/H = 0 vertical line at x/H = 1.4, x/H = 1.0, x/H
= 0.6, x/H = 1.4, x/H = 1.0, x/H = 0.6, as shown in Fig. 4. The loca-
tions of the measurement points were illustrated in Fig. 3. A good
agreement between the simulated and measured data can be seen
from Fig. 4 with average R2 of 0.991, average RMSE of 0.074 and
average MEB of 0.016. The maximum discrepancy of 0.26 m/s
appeared at the position of x/H = 0.6, z/H = 0.3, because steady
RANS simulation is not good at predicting the separation and recir-
culation in the downstream of buildings [12] [11]. With reasonable
overall accuracy, we validated the standard k-e model in the But-
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

terfly plugin in Rhino - Grasshopper for subsequent simulation of

outdoor flow.

3. Case study

According to Chinese Code for Design of Nursery and Kinder-

garten Buildings [27], the general layout of kindergartens should
include well-designed outdoor space in line with children’s physi-
ological and psychological characteristics. The geometric form and
location of a kindergarten would significantly alter the microcli-
mate of its outdoor spaces. Therefore, our optimization framework
was applied to the inverse design of a kindergarten for
demonstration.

3.1. General forms of kindergartens

In order to reasonably setup the design variables and con-

straints, we collected a list of kindergartens from a school informa-
tion database in China [32] and randomly selected 120 samples of
kindergarten to study their general forms, including the building
height, building shape, number of buildings, and the surrounding
environment. First, it was found that most of the main building
of these kindergartens have three floors, which is in accordance
with the Chinese Code for Design of Nursery and Kindergarten
Buildings [27]. Then, as Table 3 shows, most of the selected kinder-
gartens were single-building layout built within high-density res-
idential areas. The building forms can be summarized into strip
form, L form, C form, ladder form, T form, branch form, H form, O
form and courtyard form. The demonstration and proportion of
each form are shown in Fig. 5. The above analysis of the building
forms and surroundings provided a foundation for the subsequent
setup of a typical design case.

3.2. Surroundings, constraints, and design variables

According to the analysis, we decided to set the design in a

high-density residential community. A rectangular site of
42 m  38 m located in the middle of a typical community was
selected as the construction site for the kindergarten. The site
was surrounded by high-density residential buildings with height
from 30 to 40 meters. It is worth mentioning that such kind of
high-density residential community is typical in China, and it is
common to have kindergarten within residential communities to
offer convenient care services to preschool children from sur-
rounding communities. Fig. 6 shows the top and perspective views
of the kindergarten site with surrounding residential buildings.
While setting up the geometric model of the kindergarten, the
plot ratio was limited to 0.6 and the number of floors was set to
three with the floor height of 4 m, according to Standard for Kin-
dergarten Construction [35].
After the surroundings and constrains were determined, we
started to generate the building on the construction site. Analysis
shows that the majority of kindergartens only have one building,
so we placed a single building on the site. For the building shape,
we used the combination of three boxes with variable length,
width, and orientation to represent the building since three boxes
can easily create most building forms investigated (Fig. 7(c)). To
start with, four values (0°, 90°, 180°and 360°) were provided for
the rotation angle a of the building. When a = 0°or 180°(Figure 7
(a)), the position of the building could only be moved along the
vertical central axis and L1 was the distance from the center of
the middle box to the center of the site. When a = 90°or
270°(Fig. 7(b)), the position could be changed along the horizontal
central axis and L2 was the distance. After determining the building
orientation and position, the length and width of the middle box, x1
7
Fig. 6. Residential buildings surrounding the property line of the kindergarten
looking from (a) Top view and (b) Perspective view.
and y1 , was set and the area of the middle box (S1 ) was then deter-
mined. Because the whole building has limited floor area, the area
of the second (S2 ) and third box (S3 ) could be distributed by spec-
ifying the area ratio (S2 /(S2 +S3 )). Then the shape of the second and
third box could be determined by their lengths, x2 and x3 . Finally,
the relative position of the three boxes is determined by the posi-
tions of the second and third boxes from the middle box, y12 ; y13 .
The ranges and allowed change steps for the design variables are
shown in Table 4.
3.3. Studied cities and their climate
In order to examine the effect of climate on microclimate opti-
mization, we chose to design the kindergarten under the climate of
Tianjin and Shanghai. Tianjin (38°33’N–40°15’N, 116°42’E–118°0
4’E) is located in the northern part of China with an annual average
T a of 12.9 °C. The hottest month July has a monthly average T a of
26.1 °C and coldest month January has a monthly average T a of
2.4 °C. Shanghai (30°40’N - 31°53’N, 120°51’E - 122°12’E) is
located in the southern part of China. The annually mean T a of
Shanghai is about 16.9 °C, monthly mean T a of the hottest month
July is about 27.5 °C and monthly mean T a of the coldest month
January is about 4.5 °C.
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

Fig. 7. Explanation for the building design variables: (a) A case where the building is parallel to the length of the site, (b) A case where the building is parallel to the width of
the site, and (c) Examples of generated buildings of strip form, L form, C form, latter form, H form, and T form.

Table 4 meteorological parameters in the two months were selected for

Ranges and step sizes for the design variables boundary conditions of microclimate simulations, as shown in
Table 5.
Variables Range Step size
a (°) [0, 360] 90
L1 (m) [6.5, 6.5] 0.1
L2 (m) [8, 8] 0.1 4. Results
S2 /(S2 +S3 ) [0.35, 0.65] 0.01
x1 (m) [7, 12.5] 0.1 This section first presents the variation of OF to illustrate the
y1 (m) [7, 12.5] 0.1 effect of optimization. Then, the worst solution, the best solution
x2 (m) [7, 12.5] 0.1
x3 (m) [7, 12.5] 0.1
in summer, the best solution in winter and the overall best solution
y12 [y1 /2, y1 /2] 0.1 are shown to provide guidance for building design.
y13 [y1 /2, y1 /2] 0.1

4.1. Evolution of OF

Fig. 9 shows the optimization process by demonstrating OFs at

The outdoor activity of children in kindergarten is usually con-
ducted at 15:00 according to our investigation. Thus, this study
used 15:00 as the time for microclimate evaluation and lasted
for an hour. In addition, to comprehensively consider the effect
of hot and cold conditions, this study used climate data from both
summer and winter as inputs. To avoid vacations in July and Jan-
uary, June and December were selected as the time of study.
Fig. 8 shows the T a , wind speed and wind roses at 15:00 in Tian-
jin and Shanghai in June and December. The median values of
8
each generation under the climates of Tianjin. A decreased trend of
OF was demonstrated in Fig. 9, indicating that the overall thermal
stress was reduced. The maximum and minimum values of OF in
Fig. 9 were 6.53 °C and 5.37 °C occurred at generation 9 and 15,
respectively, with a difference of 1.16 K. Fig. 10 shows that under
the Shanghai climate, the OF also showed a overall decreasing
trend with the optimization. The maximum and minimum values
of OFs were 3.57 °C and 2.87 °C at Generation 2 and 15, respec-
tively, with a reduction of 0.70 K. Therefore, this framework was
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

Fig. 8. Meteorological parameters at 15:00 in June and December in Tianjin and Shanghai: (a) air temperature, (b) wind speed, and (c) wind roses.

Table 5
Boundary conditions for the numerical simulations.

City Shanghai Tianjin

Season Summer Winter Summer Winter
T a (°C) 26.5 9 27 2.7
Relative Humidity (%) 76 48 70 63
U ref (m/s) 4 3 3 3
Wind Direction East North South North
Idir (Wh/m2) 683 302 476 305
Idiff (Wh/m2) 190 98 214 164
Ihor (Wh/m2) 398 301 415 268

Fig. 9. Violin plots of objective function of each generation in Tianjin.

Fig. 10. Violin plots of objective function of each generation in Shanghai.

effective for improving outdoor thermal comfort conditions in both

Tianjin and Shanghai.
4.2. The comparison of the worst and best solutions
Figs. 11–14 shows the wind speed, T mrt and UTCI distributions
of the worst, the best in winter, the best in summer and overall
best solutions during the investigated time in Tianjin and Shang-
hai. Besides, the wind speed, T mrt and UTCI distributions of the
overall site without the kindergarten are also illustrated in
Fig. 11–14 to demonstrate the impact of surrounding buildings
on the target site.
In Tianjin, heat stress accounts for 60% of the OF and cold stress
account for 40% of the OF, so the heat stress in summer was given a
little priority over cold stress in winter during optimization. The
9
optimized kindergarten building was ladder form, located in the
middle of the site with north–south orientation. The best solution
in summer was branch form, located in the middle of the site and
north–south orientation. Comparing the best solution with the best
solution in summer, we could see that although the best solution
cast less shadows in summer (Fig. 11(b)), it also block less sunlight
in winter (Fig. 12(b)). Also, the wind from the north in winter was
accelerated by the north edges of the best solution in summer
(Fig. 12(a)), causing more cold stress than the best solution. The
best solution in winter was a east-west oriented C form building,
located in the north of the site. It obstructed the strong airflow
from the north (Fig. 12)) and cast little shadow on the site
(Fig. 12(b)) in winter. The least recommended solution was ladder
form, located in the south of the site and east–west orientation. It
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

Fig. 11. Distributions of (a) wind speed, (b) T mrt and (c) UTCI in summer for the overall site without kindergarten, the worst, the best in winter, the best in summer and the
overall best solutions at 1 m in Tianjin.

10
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al. Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824

Fig. 12. Distributions of (a) wind speed, (b) T mrt and (c) UTCI in winter for the overall site without kindergarten, the worst, the best in winter, the best in summer, and the
overall best solution at 1 m in Tianjin.

11
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
cast large shadows in winter (Fig. 12)) and small shadows in sum-
mer (Fig. 11(b)). Not only could it not block the airflow from the
north in winter, it accelerated it at its northern edges (Fig. 12(a)).
In Shanghai, cold stress accounts for just 13% of OF while heat
stress account for 87% of OF, so the optimization basically just con-
sidered the cooling effect in summer. For the same reason, the best
solution was almost identical to the best solution in summer,
which was ladder-shaped, located in the middle of the site and par-
allel to the width of the site (Fig. 13, Fig. 14). In summer, the solu-
tion cast large shadows (Fig. 13)) and formed a canyon with the
surrounding buildings on the north (Fig. 13(c)). The flow entered
Fig. 13. Distributions of (a) wind speed, (b) T mrt and (c) UTCI in summer for the overall site without kindergarten, the worst, the best in winter, the best in summer, and the
overall best solutions at 1 m in Shanghai.
12
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
from the east and accelerated in the canyon (Fig. 13(c)). Also, the
flow from the southeast was further accelerated by the south edge
of the target building. The high wind speed together with large
shadows created a strong cooling effect in summer. The best solu-
tion in winter was a branch form building parallel to the length of
the site, located in the middle of the site with low wind speed in
winter (Fig. 14(c)). The least recommended solution was strip
form, located in the south of the site and parallel to the length of
the site(Fig. 13, Fig. 14). It could block little sunshine in summer
(Fig. 13)) and accelerate the northern flow of winter with the long
windward wall (Fig. 14(c)).
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
Fig. 14. Distributions of (a) wind speed, (b) T mrt and (c) UTCI in winter for the overall site without kindergarten, the worst, the best in winter, the best in summer, and the
overall best solution at 1 m in Shanghai.
5. Discussion
In addition to thermal stress, we also compared the effect of
wind speed and solar radiation on outdoor thermal comfort during
the optimization since they are two key factors that lead to the
spatial variations of thermal stress. Then, limitations and future
studies are discussed for future improvement.
5.1. Comparing the effect of solar radiation and wind
Fig. 15 and Fig. 16 further identified the correlations of T mrt and
wind speed with thermal stress on featured scenarios in summer
13
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
and winter. The data used in the correlation analyses were from
different individuals during the optimization.
Fig. 16 and Fig. 16(a) show that T mrt had stronger correlation
with thermal stress than wind speed in summer in both Tianjin
and Shanghai. That’s because wind speed on the target site was
generally low and the soalr radiation was very strong in summer,
so changes in wind speed had less impact on UTCI than T mrt .
Fig. 15(b) illustrates that T mrt had stronger correlation with ther-
mal stress than wind speed in winter Tianjin. Comparing Fig. 15
(b) and Fig. 15(b), it can be found that wind speed had higher cor-
relation with thermal stress in winter than in summer. One expla-
nation is that the wind speed in winter was higher than summer in
Tinajin. Another possible reason is that UTCI has been found to be
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
Fig. 15. T mrt and wind speed vs. (a) average heat stress and (b) average cold stress in Tianjin.
Fig. 16. T mrt and wind speed vs. (a) average heat stress and (b) average cold stress in Shanghai.
sensitive to identify severe weather caused by excessive wind
speed in winter [48]. Fig. 16(b) shows that wind speed had strong
correlation with cold stress while T mrt had almost no correlation
with cold stress in winter Shanghai. The explanation can be found
in Fig. 14, where we can see that the shaded places with wind
speed lower than 0.6 m/s were still comfortable, so excessive wind
speed was the main cause of cold stress in winter Shanghai. In gen-
eral, on the simulated sunny days in Tianjin and Shanghai with a
comparatively low wind speed of 3 m/s and 4 m/s as an inlet con-
dition, solar radiation contributed more to outdoor thermal com-
fort than wind speed.
Our result corroborates the findings from other ‘‘radiation over
wind” studies. Liu et al. [42] in Tianjin concluded that the effect of
sun on outdoor thermal comfort was more than two times greater
that of wind. Liu et al. [45] in Changsha found that solar radiation
contributed more than wind speed to human outdoor thermal sen-
sation. Xu et al. [59] investigated thermal comfort during winter in
Xi’an and found that solar radiation had the most significant influ-
ence on the outdoor overall comfort among the microclimatic
parameters. Moreover, wind speed simulation is more computa-
tionally intensive than estimation of solar radiation. Therefore,
when computation resources are limited, the optimization of solar
radiation should be given priority over wind.
However, the above ‘‘radiation over wind” principle cannot be
applied universally. Although wind is less effective than solar radi-
ation to improve outdoor thermal comfort in locations with rather
14
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
low average wind speeds, as the wind speed increases, the effect of
wind may be equal to that of solar radiation and even exceed it. For
example, Brozovsky et al. [13] found that wind and sun can
become equally effective in increasing outdoor thermal comfort
when increasing inlet wind speed to 8 m/s. Besides, the influence
of radiation and wind on thermal comfort is also related to other
parameters. For example, in winter Shanghai with a relatively
warm T a , wind sheltering was the more effective way to improve
outdoor thermal comfort than solar access.
5.2. Limitations and future studies
Limitations in this study and some possible directions for fur-
ther improvement are discussed below. Firstly, this study simu-
lated wind and solar radiation while neglected the spatial
variation of air temperature and humidity. On one hand, this is
due to the less impact of urban morphology on air temperature
and humidity than wind and solar radiation. For example, the air
temperature is changed by 2 °C on average for different climate
on the hottest time of a day, and the humidity change was also lim-
ited [41]. On the contrary, the changes of the solar radiation and
wind by the urban morphology are huge. On the other hand, the
time consumed in the co-simulation of the entire microclimate is
prohibitive since the simulation is conducted for many times for
a optimization study. Secondly, outdoor thermal comfort was used
as a single assessment standard in this study and the indoor com-
R. Sun, J. Liu, D. Lai et al.
fort, the day-lighting and energy consumption of the buildings
have not been considered, so multi-objective optimization could
be carried out in the future. Thirdly, this study just considered
the impact of urban geometry on microclimate, however, microcli-
mate variability into the urban texture also depends on vegetation,
buildings and pavements materials, anthropogenic activities and
so on. Therefore, evapotranspiration phenomena of plants, charac-
terization of buildings and pavements materials, thermal mass of
surrounding buildings and grounds and the simulation of anthro-
pogenic heat should be introduced to this framework to enhance
the accuracy of simulations in the future. Fourthly, the UTCI index
used in our study does not particularly consider the range of age.
Since we modelled a kindergarten in our case study, it would be
more rigorous if we adjusted human thermal comfort model to
children. We do notice that some researchers had studied adaptive
outdoor thermal comfort models for children, but their conclusions
can be only applied to the climates that they studied and universal
conclusion hasn’t been reached yet at present [31,52,24]. Relevant
studies can be carried out in the future.
6. Conclusions
The contributions of this study can be summarized by two
parts: Theoretically, a framework to optimize the outdoor thermal
comfort during early building design stage was proposed. The
influence of building form and location on the thermal comfort
of its outdoor space was evaluated by normalizing the spatially
and temporally averaged thermal stress. After validating the wind
speed and solar radiation simulations, the proposed framework
was applied to optimize the outdoor thermal comfort of a kinder-
garten located in a high-density residential community under the
climates of Tianjin and Shanghai. The framework has been proven
to be able to improve the time-averaged outdoor thermal comfort
at building scale. In Tianjin, optimization reduced the overall ther-
mal stress from 6.53 °C to 5.37 °C. In Shanghai, optimization
reduced the overall thermal stress from 3.57 °C to 2.87 °C. It indi-
cates that this study expanded the spatial and temporal scale of
outdoor thermal comfort inverse design.
Practically, this study provides some guidelines for kinder-
garten design considering outdoor thermal comfort in Tianjin and
Shanghai: Both heat and cold stresses should be considered in
Tianjin, while in Shanghai, heat stress in summer was given prior-
ity over cold stress in winter. That’s because cold stress and heat
stress were comparable in Tianjin while heat stress was seven
times stronger than cold stress in Shanghai under the simulated
weather conditions. In Tianjin, the optimized kindergarten build-
ing was ladder form, located in the middle of the site with
north–south orientation. This form casts big shadows in summer
without blocking too much sunlight in winter. In Shanghai, the
best solution was ladder-shaped, located in the middle of the site
and parallel to the width of the site. This form casts large shadows
and accelerates wind speed in summer. Wind demonstrated more
limited contributions than solar radiation during optimization
because the wind speed distributions were relatively low and uni-
form with in high-density urban area.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
15
Energy & Buildings 284 (2023) 112824
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52008242 and 51808487)
and Stiftelsen für internationalisering av hügre utbild-ning och
forskning (STINT), Sweden (Dnr: CH2020-8665).The computations
were partially enabled by resources provided by the Swedish
National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at PDC partially
funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement
No. 2018-05973. We thank undergraduate students Yuanyuan Wu,
Yaxi Zuo, Di Chen, and Yulun Xu for their participation and discus-
sions in the project.
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