Sustainable design of courtyard environment: From the perspectives of airborne diseases control and human health

Courtyards have functioned as an effective passive architectural design strategy for various climate conditions, especially popular in hot-humid climates. Sustainable and delicate designs are necessary to create safe, healthy and comfortable courtyard environment. Most of the available literature focused on thermal comfort for courtyard, and the researches towards air pollution/disease control was rare. Further considering the severe impact of COVID-19 crisis, the current study aims to develop a numerical strategy to optimize physical environment in courtyard, including distributions of airborne pollutant, drought sensation and infection risk. Experimental data from literature was used to validate the numerical models. The evaluation indexes were adopted for the assessment of draft sensation, pollution exposure risk etc. The influences of geometric design parameters (i.e., courtyard width, height etc.) were investigated, and courtyard width (D) was the most sensitive parameter. If D increased from 5.8 m to 11.8 m, average air pollutant concentration decreased by 80 %, while drought sensation increased by 30 %. In static wind conditions, infection possibility (with R value up to 3 %) in courtyard was comparable to those in indoor environments during the COVID-19 period. This work will be of great importance for sustainable development of courtyards from the perspectives of airborne diseases control.