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Economic development limits the living quality of rural residents. In particular, the residential buildings in northern China generally have poor thermal comfort in winter, which affects the physical and mental health of residents. Because of the separation of rooms, residents who live in cave dwellings often have to enter and leave rooms in the course of their daily lives, which leads to worse thermal feelings in winter. Because of the low price and the wind insulation and heat storage, sunrooms are widely used in renovations of rural houses. The traditional purpose of the addition of a sunroom is to provide a buffer room between outdoor and indoor spaces. This manuscript focuses on improving the degree of thermal comfort by means of a sunroom connecting all rooms. This study selected two families with the same number of members and similar daily activities as the study cases. One of the families had a sunroom built to connect its bedroom, living room, and washroom. The household's air temperature and human comfort were measured both on holidays and on workdays. It is demonstrated that adding a sunroom can significantly stabilize the thermal environment and increase the air temperature in both the bedroom and the living room. Adding a sunroom can increase the air temperature of a cave dwelling's main room by 1.0 °C on workdays and 4.3 °C on holidays. A cave dwelling with a sunroom can also provide residents with a decent level of human comfort for 24.4% of their daily time on workdays and 39.1% of the time during holidays. This research demonstrates that a sunroom can not only increase the air temperature in cave dwellings but also enhance the stability of human comfort. The conclusion provides new renovation ideas for improving the living comfort of cave dwellings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mode of urban renewal in China has changed from incremental expansion to a value-added stage, and the development of cities has increasingly focused on the human experience and quality improvement. However, Cultural Street Vending and the unique street spaces in the historic districts that bear important connotations to the city have shown a trend of rapid decline and even disappearance. Therefore, how to identify the characteristics and connotations of such street vending spaces, grasp the relationship between perception of locality and built environment elements in different states and formulate targeted protection and renewal strategies is presently an urgent problem to be solved. Many studies have now discussed in detail the identification of elements, street perception and preservation strategies for historic districts. However, the Cultural Street Vending space, which carries special urban memory connotations, has been neglected, especially the characterisation of this type of space in different time dimensions. This paper takes the Cultural Street Vending space as a research object and focuses on the perceptual differences between its market day and non-market day, aiming at grasping the perceptual characteristics and constituent elements of this type of street space in different time states, as well as the patterns of changes they undergo. This paper took the Baxian Temple, a typical Cultural Street Vending space in a historic district of Xi'an, as the research object and took 30 architecture students as the evaluators to score 33 pairs of adjectives and recall the elements of nine streets. This paper compared and analysed the differences in the structure of people's psychological perception of the street in the state of market day and non-market day by SD method. It was found that the activities of the vendors obviously promoted people's positive emotions, and three commonality factors including impression, vitality and morphosis were extracted through the factor analysis. Moreover, through the element recall method to understand the change in element perception on the market day, we found that the range of people's perception was smaller on the market day and summarised the element map of the space and the element components of high, medium and low characteristics. The correlation analysis between psychological quantities and environmental elements revealed that people's positive psychology has a positive correlation with vendors, goods and street components and a negative correlation with greening, colour and texture. This study can provide an important research basis for the development of conservation and renewal strategies for this type of Cultural Street Vending space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many neighbourhoods have traditional characteristics in China; it's both the wealth of urban and the trouble. With the improvement in the public's requirements for outdoor living standards, the preservation of the memory of the city block and the transformation of the block brought by the embedding of the new way of life need to be solved properly. Accordingly, this research collected the block patterns and average pedestrian horizontal wind speeds of 12 different formation years based on the plot ratio, building density, building height, enclosure, height fall, aspect ratio and Sky view factors of the traditional blocks in Xi'an. The correlation between various morphological parameters and mean pedestrian horizontal wind speed was discussed. Finally, two types of prediction formulas are obtained, namely the formula of the point concept parameter and the mean pedestrian horizontal wind speed and the formula of the average site conceptual parameter and the average pedestrian horizontal wind speed. This study aims to explore the parameter combinations of traditional block shape optimisation. It also aims to guide the construction activities that improve the outdoor event space quality of modern urban residents in the future. Research methods and results can provide reference for urban and block morphological transformation in similar climate zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of global warming and urban heat island has raised the attention for the outdoor thermal comfort. Vegetation in the improvement of urban micro-climate has been confirmed by a large number of scholars. The problem of the uncomfortable summer climate in China's Cold region didn't get enough research. In this paper, the summer thermal comfort of the street canyon has been studied. The main research intent is to analyze the relationship between the street tree pattern and the thermal comfort of street canyon. It’s demonstrated that, in north-south street, it is suitable for the arrangement of street tree to be at the centre on one side of the street. The higher the height of the street tree, the more comfortable thermal environment the street gets. However, when the ratio of the street tree height to the street building is greater than 10:18, the improvement effect decreases. In east-west street, planting the street tree clinging to the street buildings can provide a better thermal comfort improvement effect. The result of this study can serve as a guide to the greening design in China B-cold region and other regions with similar climatic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aconitum georgei Comber is a China-specific Aconitum (Ranunculaceae) plant. In the present study, eighteen compounds, including fourteen diterpenoid alkaloids (1 – 14) and four nonalkaloidal constituents (15 – 18) were isolated from the roots of A. georgei. Among them, fifteen compounds (1 – 11 and 14 – 18) have not previously been found in this species, and 3-methoxymethylbenzoate (17) has not previously been isolated from the Aconitum genus. The chemotaxonomic value of these compounds was explored through network analysis. The results showed that some of these compounds such as falconeridine (6) and 14-anisoyl- N -deethylaconine (10) showed limited distribution in the genus, which could help to narrow species identification to A. georgei where other phenotypic characters are limited. • Eighteen compounds were isolated from Aconitum georgei. • Fifteen compounds were isolated in A. georgei for the first time. • 3-methoxymethylbenzoate has not previously been isolated from genus Aconitum. • Compound-species network analysis exhibited their chemotaxonomic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the process of the high-speed urbanization in Chinese cities, the social, economic, and political status and the interaction between each factor have been more focused on urban traditional district renewal. However, the effects on urban microclimate and the residential living conditions in traditional districts are not well discussed, which is strongly related to the living comfort and citizens' well-being. In this study, two typical traditional districts in Xi'an are selected. According to the original situation of building functions and the community characteristics, two renewal plans are proposed by adding vegetation in open spaces (V), and adding vegetation combined with building redevelopment (V&B), in order to balance the living convenience and thermal environment. Via ENVI-met simulation, the effects of the district renewal plans on thermal environment including wind speed, air temperature, and mean radiant temperature are evaluated. This study provides method of environmental evaluation for traditional district renewal, which contributes to sustainable urban planning in historical districts, and provides recommendations for related policy development., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)