Natural ventilation can cool down the indoor environment and improve the air quality of buildings without consuming energy. The configuration of an inner corridor with double-sided classrooms is widely used in school buildings because of advantages such as space-saving and compactness. However, the inner doors or windows on the corridor side of these classrooms are often closed due to the dispersion of pollution and noise between classrooms. To introduce more fresh air from the outside, this study proposes a novel design to set up a horizontal airflow channel through the building to provide cross-ventilation for classrooms on both sides. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was verified using experimental data and was employed to predict the airflow rate of the air channel by investigating different, sizes of air channels, wind directions, wind velocities and climate data, to assess the potential of the technology. The implementation of a channel area-to-floor area ratio of 2% (1.8 m²) provided an average increase in the ventilation rate of 215% on an annualized basis when applied and simulated in typical conditions from 10 different cities in China. This technology could be used to improve natural airflow rates in other buildings which use interior corridors in their design.

The impacts of greenery systems (GSs) on microclimate conditions and building energy performance have been frequently investigated using experiments and simulations during the past decades, especially in summer and winter. However, few studies have focused on the performance of GSs in transition seasons. The ambient weather conditions vary with great fluctuations during transition seasons, which may result in severe oscillations in indoor environments. To investigate the impacts of GSs on indoor environments, an experiment was conducted using a contrastive test platform, which consisted of two experimental rooms, one equipped with a GS and the other without, from 1 April 2019 to 31 May 2019 in Hunan, China. Both rooms were free-running. The experimental results showed that the GS had the ability to reduce the oscillations in the indoor environment. The oscillations in indoor dry-bulb temperature (DBT) and relative humidity (RH) were reduced by 39.3% and 28.8%, respectively. The maximum daily DBT and RH ranges were, respectively, cut down by 3.5 °C and 12.4%. The maximum reductions in external and internal surface temperatures were 29.5 °C and 9.4 °C, respectively, for the GS, while the average reductions were 1.6~4.1 °C and 0.2~1.3 °C, respectively, depending on the orientation of the surfaces. The operative temperature (OT) during the daytime on sunny days was also lowered by the GS. The differences in OT between the two rooms ranged from −1.8 °C to 8.2 °C, with an average of 1.0 °C. The GS can improve the indoor thermal comfort during transition seasons. The thermal dissatisfaction was decreased by 7.9%. This lengthened the thermal comfort time by 15% across the whole day and by 28% during the daytime. This indicates reductions in air-conditioning system operating times, leading to energy savings.