Gang Yao

Vernacular architecture, as a significant category of cultural heritage, embodies climate-responsive and environmentally adaptive wisdom through its passive design strategies. However, conservation practices often entail a trade-off between preserving authenticity and enhancing indoor environmental performance. Taking the Shaoxing Taimen building in Zhejiang, China, as a case study, this research employs parametric modelling and multi-scenario dynamic simulations to systematically quantify the climate-responsive performance of core spatial elements and the coupling effects among strategies. The analysis proceeds from single-strategy marginal effects to combined-strategy assessments, incorporating synergy/antagonism coefficients, seasonal trade-offs, multi-scenario robustness, and behavioural regulation. The findings indicate that certain strategies provide limited benefits in isolation, whereas their combined application yields substantial synergistic effects. The magnitude and direction of these coupling effects vary seasonally and across scenarios, and while combined strategies improve annual thermal comfort, they concurrently increase theoretical energy demand. This study provides quantitative evidence for the environmental sustainability of Shaoxing Taimen buildings in the hot-summer and cold-winter (HSCW) climate zone, while supporting conservation and restoration decision-making and highlighting the priority of combined restoration over isolated interventions.

In response to the urgent need for energy-efficient retrofits in industrial buildings under global climate goals, this study presents a robust multi-objective optimization framework that integrates building performance simulation, surrogate modeling, evolutionary algorithms, and decision analysis. A representative old factory building in Wenzhou, China, is selected as the case study. DesignBuilder is used to simulate energy consumption, thermal comfort, and carbon emissions. To reduce computational costs, surrogate models based on Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) are developed and compared in terms of predictive performance.The results show that BPNN demonstrates superior predictive accuracy compared to SVR, with higher R and lower RMSE values. Then, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III) is employed to generate a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, and the entropy-weighted TOPSIS method is applied to identify the most balanced retrofit option. The optimized design results in a 10.06% reduction in thermal discomfort hours (Tdh), a 35.45% reduction in energy density index (EDI), and a 28.86% reduction in life-cycle carbon emissions (LCCO₂), respectively. Overall, the proposed framework proves to be highly applicable to the low-carbon renovation of existing industrial buildings, offering a practical and scalable decision-support approach for achieving a balance among energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, and indoor comfort.

With the intensification of the global energy crisis, the application of photovoltaic (PV) technology in the field of architecture has gradually become an important direction for sustainable building design. Especially in cold regions, how to choose the right photovoltaic technology and system type to improve energy efficiency is one of the current research hotspots. This paper investigates the performance of building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) and building applied photovoltaics (BAPV) systems, as well as different photovoltaic (PV) technologies (including c-Si, CIS, and CdTe), for rural residences in cold regions. The study uses a representative rural residence in Xuzhou, China, as the benchmark model, with the installed capacity of the PV system set at 9.0 kW p. By evaluating key performance parameters, including annual power generation, yield factor, performance ratio, and system losses, the study provides a comparison of the BAPV and BIPV systems with different PV technologies. The results reveal that the c-Si-based BIPV system exhibits the lowest annual power generation and performance ratio, with the highest losses. In contrast, the CdTe-based BAPV system performs the best in terms of annual power generation and performance ratio, while also demonstrating the lowest losses. Overall, among these two systems, the BAPV system surpasses the BIPV system in overall efficiency; and at the technological level, CdTe technology outperforms both CIS and c-Si technologies.

The roof is the part of a building that is exposed to solar radiation for the longest period, making green roofs particularly effective in reducing air conditioning energy consumption during the summer. This study aims to assess the advantages of modular green roofs in terms of energy savings and cost reduction during the summer in Xuzhou. By conducting field measurements and surveys under both air-conditioned and non-air-conditioned conditions and utilizing building energy simulation tools, the performance of green roofs with different parameters was compared. Using EnergyPlus, factors such as soil thickness, thermal conductivity, and leaf area index were simulated. The results indicated that green roofs have superior thermal performance in summer, with the daily cooling load per unit area for top-floor rooms being 1.05 kWh/m², 0.21 kWh/m² lower than that for bare roofs, achieving an energy saving rate of 16.7%. It is recommended that soil thickness not exceed 0.3 m and insulation thickness not exceed 0.05 m or be set to 0 m. Take building no. 2 of the Xuzhou material market as an example: with the optimized green roof, the energy saving rate increased to 27.0%, which is 12.4% higher than that of the original green roof. The suggested cost for modular green roofs is 204 RMB/m².

As the field of zero energy building design and research continues to progress, the use of data analysis methods is on the rise. These methods are applied to create assessment criteria, compare performance, and aid in design decision making. Decision trees, as a data-driven approach, offer interpretability and predictability, assisting designers in summarizing their design experience and serving as a foundation for design references. However, the current application of decision tree methods in the zero energy house sector primarily focuses on HVAC systems, lacking a comprehensive exploration from an architectural design perspective. Therefore, this study presents an empirical method for building and applying models based on decision trees, using zero energy house cases in severely cold regions of China as samples. Through an analysis of the interactions among various passive design parameters and the use of EnergyPlus for performance simulations, a decision tree model is established. This model aids in determining the recommended combinations of passive design parameters that meet the criteria of low energy consumption. Moreover, feature weighting highlights the most influential passive design parameters on building energy consumption, including the length of the architectural gestalt plane, the roof shape, and the ground thermal resistance. This research provides valuable methods and guidance for the design and construction of zero energy houses in severely cold regions of China.

Solar Decathlon is a multi-disciplinary international competition that integrates energy-saving design strategies to design, build and operate zero-energy solar houses. This study focused on the 15 entries in the third Solar Decathlon China. It summarized their energy-saving design strategies into strategies of architectural design, equipment management, energy acquisition and intelligent regulation, and extracted a total of 22 key design elements. Based on the scoring results of the competition, this study analyzed the application of different design strategies with qualitative analysis; through quantitative analysis, 22 design elements were associated with the score, and the impact of different strategies on the score was comprehensively analyzed. As revealed in the data, design concept, functional structure and application type of renewable energy are significantly correlated with and have a great impact on the score; in contrast, building area and thermal buffer space are not significantly correlated with the score. On the basis of data analysis, this study provides a quantitative decision basis for the energy-saving design strategy of zero-energy buildings, and establishes an empirical model for the design of zero-energy solar buildings in Zhangbei County, Zhangjiakou City. This paper is helpful for the design practice and application of subsequent studies on ZEBs.

Building Information Modeling (BIM), as an auxiliary design platform, is increasingly adopted in construction projects. However, it is not widely applied in the collaborative design of zero energy buildings (ZEBs), due to the cross-discipline and complex features of ZEB projects and lack of research on the procedure and method of collaborative design in this field. This paper introduces a BIM-based collaborative design method for ZEBs. From the perspective of the technical requirements of ZEBs, the study elaborates the application of a BIM-based collaborative design method among specialists from different disciplines in passive design, renewable energy utilization and active design. The feasibility of this method is verified by the actual design and construction of the T&A House in Solar Decathlon China (SDC) competition. The research results show that the BIM-based collaborative design method can facilitate the completion of a construction project and achieve the expected goal of zero energy consumption in ZEBs.

In view of the security requirements of the power supply of the airport flight information system and the continuous improvement of the national energy conservation and environmental protection requirements, this paper proposes that the UPS power supply of the flight information system should adopt the mode of parallel operation. In addition, the terminal T2 of Xi'an Xianyang International Airport was successfully renovated and operated, which improved the power supply reliability, energy conservation and environmental protection of the flight information system. This paper comprehensively analyzes the cause and effect. Changing the operation mode of UPS effectively improves the power supply reliability of flight information system of Xi'an Xianyang International Airport and reduces energy consumption.