Disaggregate Analysis of the Inter-Building Effect in a Dense Urban Environment

The built environment contributes significantly to the rapidly growing world energy expenditure. Due to urbanization, buildings will continue to contribute to these escalating trends because of their tighter spatial interrelationships, and the influence of their surrounding micro-environment with respect to their orientations and designs. The concept of the Inter-Building Effect (IBE) was introduced to understand such complex mutual impact within spatially proximal buildings. As an extension and a more nuanced analysis of the IBE, our research sought to disaggregate and quantify the influence of mutual shading and mutual reflection within a network of buildings. A procedure to separately assess the complex interactions that make up the IBE was developed by comparative simulation and analysis in a dynamic simulation environment. We built an urban building network model and conducted cross-regional analysis under different climatological contexts by examining mutual shading only and mutual reflection only, respectively. We found the shading effect played a more significant role in terms of impact on energy consumption. This resulted in substantial variations for the control building's energy consumption when the shading effect was disaggregated from the IBE. The results of the simulations in varying climatological contexts also revealed consistent trends of greater impact on the IBE for shading and reflection in warmer climatic cities. These findings expand and deepen our understanding of the IBE and may help in the search to minimize mutual influences between buildings that lead to increases in energy consumption in urban environments. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.