Courtyard Microclimates in Central Asia: Traditional Passive Cooling Strategies and Their Modern Relevance

Inward-oriented Central Asian courtyards must limit summer overheating and winter heating demand through one envelope, yet the relative strengths of geometry, wall mass, openings, and vegetation have not been measured under continental cold-desert conditions. This study quantifies them with a three-dimensional coupled CFD and building-energy model of a single-story courtyard dwelling prototype surveyed in Bukhara Region, Uzbekistan, validated on two monitored days at an indoor operative-temperature RMSE of 1.76 °C. Twelve variables covering those four groups entered a mixed-level near-orthogonal 120-scenario design, and fifty screened candidates were simulated directly. Wall thickness, high side-window ratio, and green coverage form the leading overheating group, with level mean spans of 172.6, 172.0, and 170.3 h against 131.7 h for window-to-wall ratio. The equal-weight rule selected P04 from ten non-dominated solutions, at 972 h of overheating, 134.5 kWh m−2 of heating demand, a 10.2 h−1 air change rate, and a 120.8 kWh m−2 annual energy use intensity, 44.6% below the 218 kWh m−2 reference. The peak-shift lag passes 4 h at a wall thickness of 500 mm, and the selected 600 mm wall reaches a lag of 6.5 h. These results connect courtyard typology to measured factor responses and bounded design selection.