Abstract
The global trend on energy integration and building efficiency is making both researchers and building developers look for technical solutions to use facade surfaces for energy harvesting. In this work, the assessment of the thermal performance of a double-skin facade (DSF) with a venetian blind-type of structure used as a solar thermal collector by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is presented. A Venetian blind collector would allow for heat rejection/energy harvesting and exterior views simultaneously and can be easily integrated into the DSF aesthetical design. For the purposes of this study, the modeled facades (south, west, and east-oriented) were set to be located in Barcelona (Spain), where large solar gains are a constant condition throughout the year, and such large semi-transparent envelopes lead to interior over-heating in buildings, even during the winter. For the studied facades, both the reductions in radiative heat gains entering the building and the heat recovery in the Venetian blind collector were evaluated for a yearlong operation.
Highlights
The efficient implementation and use of clean energy resources is one of the greatest challenges that we face as a global society
Obtained average surface and cavity temperatures for the studied double-skin facade (DSF)-Venetian blinds (VB) thermal collector system were in all cases lower than the values reported for DSF with mechanical air ventilation operating under similar climatic conditions [6,8,16]
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) proves to be a useful tool when modeling conductive/convective/radiative heat transfer in proves to be a useful tool when were modeling conductive/convective/radiative heatmodule transferfor in Numerical simulations run for a yearlong operation of a double skin facade-venetian blind (DSF-VB)
Summary
The efficient implementation and use of clean energy resources is one of the greatest challenges that we face as a global society. CFD has been used to model and validate the design of solar thermal collectors in order to obtain detailed information on the flow development and temperature distributions in the device. Previous works on this subject include the study of flat plate solar energy collectors [23,24], polymer solar collectors [25,26], solar collectors with horizontally inclined absorber strips [27], and tilted wavy solar collectors [28] on integrated collector storage devices [29,30], among others.
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