Achieving comfort in hot summer and cold winter (HSCW) climate zones can be challenging, since the climate is characterized by high temperatures in the summer and relatively colder temperatures in the winter. Courtyards, along with other semi-open spaces such as verandas and overhangs, play an important role in mitigating outdoor climate fluctuations. In this research, the effects of courtyards on the thermal performance of vernacular houses in HSCW climate zones were studied via field measurements and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. The selected courtyard house was a representative vernacular timber dwelling situated in the southeast of Chongqing, China. The indoor and outdoor air temperature measurements revealed that the courtyard did play an active role as a climatic buffer and significantly reduced the temperature’s peak value in the summer, while during the winter, the courtyard prevented the surrounding rooms from receiving direct solar radiation, and thus to some extent acted as a heat barrier. The contributions of thermal mass are quite limited in this area, due to insufficient solar radiation in winter and general building operations. The natural ventilation mechanism of courtyard houses in HSCW zones was further studied through CFD simulations. The selected opened courtyard was compared to an enclosed structure with similar building configurations. The airflow patterns driven by wind and buoyancy effects were first simulated separately, and then together, to illustrate the ventilation mechanisms. The simulation results show that the courtyard’s natural ventilation behavior benefited from the proper openings on ground level.

To address the challenges of detecting multi-scale road defects and the lack of lightweight designs in conventional detection models, we propose ACD-YOLOv8, an enhanced model based on YOLOv8s. Our model enhances baseline architecture by integrating three key components: a lightweight Cross-Scale Feature Fusion Module (CCFM), an ADown sampling operation, and a Dynamic Head (DyHead). Experimental results on the RDD2022 dataset demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Compared to the baseline YOLOv8s, ACD-YOLOv8 achieves a 0.9% increase in mAP@0.5 and a 1.6% increase in the more stringent mAP@0.5:0.95 metric. Simultaneously, the model’s parameter count is reduced by 3.72 million (a 33.3% reduction) and its size is reduced by 7.4 MB. This work provides a practical and scalable solution for deploying high-accuracy defect detection on resource-constrained mobile platforms, offering significant potential to enhance traffic safety and maintenance efficiency.

Chinese heated walls represent a traditional space heating technique that is still widely used in vernacular houses in northern China. Such walls efficiently recover gas heat from heating stoves and reduce users′ exposures to indoor air pollution. This experimental study proposed a heat recovery system composed of a heated wall and fireplace. Test rooms were set up to evaluate the surface temperature distribution and thermal performance of the heated wall in response to several combustion patterns. The results show that an intermittent combustion heated wall heated only by a stove used for cooking can produce a relatively more comfortable indoor environment without extra energy consumption. In this research, indoor air temperature was increased by 3.3 to 4.0°C over the control room. The temperature distribution of the heated wall′s surface was nonuniform, with a temperature range of 116.03°C. It was also found that the combustion pattern had a major impact on the initial and peak temperatures of the wall body′s surface during combustion.

Residential crowding is a widespread housing-health challenge, but floor-area and occupancy measures offer limited guidance for architectural assessment. This systematic review examined associations between residential crowding and mental-health and psychosocial outcomes, relevant environmental-psychological mechanisms, and design-oriented spatial indicators. Following PRISMA 2020, we searched four databases from inception through 3 April 2026. Seventy-six empirical studies were included; 48 formed a structured evidence matrix, and studies reporting adjusted estimates in explicit spatial units underwent additional extraction. Methodological quality was appraised using a ROBINS-E-style framework. Heterogeneity in exposure definitions, outcomes, effect metrics, and study designs precluded meta-analysis. The narrative synthesis therefore emphasized adjusted estimates, temporality, confounder control, and risk of bias rather than unweighted study counts. Greater livable area was associated with lower depression risk, higher persons-per-room ratios with greater child behavioural difficulties, and bedroom-loss-driven crowding with increased depressive symptoms. These estimates did not support a universal threshold. Privacy loss and reduced perceived control recurred most broadly. Sleep disturbance, family strain, weakened social support, and impaired sense of home were salient in particular populations and settings. The resulting Crowding-Sensitive Residential Performance Assessment integrates spatial load, regulatory capacity, and occupancy context.