The influence of external temperature and convective heat exchange with an environment on heat transfer inside phase change material embedded brick

Abstract

In building industry, phase change materials protect wall structures from thermal loads, smoothing peak temperatures and providing a comfortable thermal regime inside the building. The present research is devoted to the study of heat transfer in a building block with paraffin inserts under unsteady external thermal impact using mathematical simulation technique based on the developed in-house computational code. The effects of external air temperature and the heat transfer coefficient between the environment and the building element on the phase change within the block have been analyzed. It has been shown that an increase in the volume of phase change material has a great influence on heat transfer enhancement and allows to support the optimal thermal regime within the building element. Moreover, a rise of considered block size contributes to a reduction of temperature on an indoor surface by almost 20% of the maximum temperature difference.