Evaluation of thermal environment to greenhouse atrium buildings

From the viewpoint of the architect, greenhouse atrium is multi-story space that provides a visually simulating link between the interior and exterior environments through skylight and large vertical glass walls. Many thermal processes and conditions, such as dynamic air temperature stratification, differential interior surface temperatures, and a multilevel zoning behavior are not well understood by quite a few designers and, thus drawing great attention from researchers and engineers world widely. An atrium with a tall ceiling height (H=28m), which is at the top of a high-rise office building, is analyzed by means of computational fluid dynamics(CFD), a software that is provided with the boundary conditions by DOE(a building energy analysis computer program). The involved analyses include solar radiation simulation, radiative heat transfer simulation, heat conduction simulation, and airflow and temperature distribution simulation. A comparison between the simulation results and the measurement results is included. Accuracy and reliability of boundary conditions is proved. For the special atrium building in this paper, different models for the glass multi-layer property and the window heat balance calculation are described. The purpose of research on this kind of atrium is to understand better computed-based energy information system for the greenhouse atrium design. Here, it is to bridge the gap between the designer and the numerical simulation model and to provide visual and textual information.