Abstract
The current paper presents the state-of-the-art of the ongoing IDEAS research project, funded under the Horizon 2020 EU framework programme. The project involves fourteen partners from six European countries and proposes a multi-source cost-effective renewable energy system for the decarbonisation of the building envelope. The system features a radiant floor fed by a heat pump for the building thermal management. The heat pump can exploit sun, air, and/or ground as thermal sources through the use of photovoltaic/thermal solar panels, air heat exchangers, and shallow ground flat-panel heat exchangers. Thermal energy storage is achieved by means of phase change materials spread along several system components, such as: radiant floor to increase its thermal inertia, solar panels for cooling purposes, ground to enhance soil thermal capacity. Within the project framework, a small-scale building, featuring a plethora of sensors for test purposes, and two large-scale buildings are meant to be equipped with the renewable energy system proposed. The small-scale building is currently in operation, and the first results are discussed in the present work. Preliminary data suggest that while multi-source systems coupled with heat pumps are particularly effective, it is complex to obtain suitable thermal energy storages on urban scale.
Highlights
Buildings play a significant role in the global energy balance
The current paper presents the state-of-the-art of the ongoing IDEAS research project, funded under the Horizon 2020 European Union (EU) framework programme
In the former, all the hardware is connected to the programmable logic controller (PLC) that reads from sensors, equipment, dataloggers (Datataker), and controls the state of every connected device trying to optimise energy consumption on the basis of rules related to temperatures and sources usage
Summary
Buildings play a significant role in the global energy balance. Typically, they account for 20-30% of the total primary energy requirements of industrialised countries, while this share rises to 40% in the European Union (EU) [1]. The use of PCMs in buildings meets several possible applications, such as their adoption in dedicated storage units [27], or in order to enhance the ground thermal capacity [28], the thermal inertia in radiant floors [29], or for thermal storage in photovoltaic systems [30] Most of these solutions find application in the IDEAS project (novel building Integration Designs for increased Efficiencies in Advanced climatically tuneable renewable energy Systems) which is funded under the Horizon 2020 EU framework programme. The consortium shows a multidisciplinary knowledge profile covering all technical, techno-economic, and socioeconomic aspects of the project It includes companies, laboratories, research institutes, non-governmental organisations, local authorities, and universities with specific expertise in the field of solar and renewable energy, thermal energy storage and PCMs, heat pumps, intelligent demandside management (DSM) and system control, user engagement. The current work presents the state-of-the-art of the smallscale plant, which has been operating since August 2020, and discusses the first results collected so far
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