Abstract
Even if the use of renewable energy sources towards autonomous buildings is promising, it is facing a fundamental issue: the shift between energy production and heating energy demand. We propose in this paper a thermally controlled storage solution using phase change materials integrated in the building walls. Its main advantage lies in the ability to activate on-demand the thermal discharge by ventilating the phase change materials. A test bench has been manufactured. Tests were performed which proved the feasibility of overnight storage with morning discharge allowing an internal air temperature increase of 5°C. Simulations based on experimental results showed that an integration in real buildings with photovoltaic energy production allows to significantly increase the building energy autonomy. If the improvement is important for all types of buildings, it showed larger absolute improvements for weakly insulated buildings than for buildings with an efficient insulation.
Highlights
If Phase Change Material (PCM) has been successfully used for heat storage and in building temperature stabilization, an air conditioning fully based on PCM has not yet been developed
As 80% of the building energy needs in central Europe corresponds to thermal energy, the proposed system drastically increases the autonomy of buildings with renewable energy
With PCM heat storage, self-consumption becomes possible at nighttime and a thermal energy autonomy is achieved if the daily local energy production is sufficient
Summary
If Phase Change Material (PCM) has been successfully used for heat storage and in building temperature stabilization, an air conditioning fully based on PCM has not yet been developed. This is due to low PCM thermal conductivity [1, 2, 3, 4], a lack of simulation tools to optimize heat extraction [5] and in most use cases, the lack of control of the charge and discharge processes [6, 7].
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