A New Approach for Energy Efficiency in Chinese Apartments

In Chinese cities, residential buildings are typically high-rise or multi-storey. There is however some common problems including overheating and heat losses within neighbouring units, especially with inefficient use of the heating energy generated from Chinese style daily cooking. According to literature, a high-rise apartment combines similar or different units on the horizontal plane, and the plane design could affect the interior thermal environment. For example, because of the performance of partition wall and positioning of kitchen, the space could be regarded as temporary heating and intermittent thermal mass during three times of cooking in a day and night, and therefore investigating how this could be further optimised would be worth the research. ‘Sharing energy’ is a potential way for household energy savings in general in residential buildings. In this paper, a comparison study of simulation work has been carried out using different typical apartments on selected horizontal planes again using an ‘entire building-scale energy saving’ concept, to promote energy efficiency technologies. The research deals with two issues: First, summary of thermal coefficient were extracted from local legislation and regulation, which is based on a typical unit of common Chinese apartments located in hot summer and cold winter zone. Second, DesignBuilder software package was used for simulation work of heating balance of internal gains and fabric heat performance. The findings have shown that both the regional thermal coefficients and occupancy activities affect the energy use, and the fabric gains and thermal performance are directly related to the overall energy consumption, never mind the apartment layout; horizontal or vertical. Chinese kitchen is considered an overheating area within housing space and there appears to be potentials for energy efficiency.