Creative Commons

This thesis deals with the micro - climatic analysis and the improvement of the energy efficiency in a typical urban residential built environment in Thessaloniki. The scope of this research is to assess the benefits of coupling the simulation of both the built environment as a whole and the building units. For that reason, the implementation of roadside trees is introduced as a possible measure to mitigate Urban Heat Island and improve building energy performance. The simulation tool s used are ENVI - met v.4 [1, 2] and EnergyPlus 8.8 [3, 4] ; ENVI - met is a three - dimensional (3D) prognostic micro - climate model based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and thermodynamics that simulates the conditions in the exterior area and between buildings . On the one hand, although ENVI - met is widely used and validated, as a micro - climate simulation tool, it does not have the ability to calculate indoor energy demand and/or consumption . Therefore , EnergyPlus is used, which is a Building Energy Simulation (BES) tool . Although EnergyPlus do es not have the ability to deal with the outdoor environment and especially with the thermal effect of vegetation and water volumes , it takes into account trees and the built environment as shading elements. Therefore, a one - way integration of the two simulation tools is the minimum requirement so that urban planners, designers and engineers to have a n adequate comprehension of the complex interaction between buildings and their surrounding micro - climate.