The kinetic and preliminary performance study on a novel solar photo-thermal catalytic hybrid Trombe-wall

Abstract

Trombe-wall is a widely used solar passive heating structure. However, the indoor environment becomes worse due to the accumulation of gaseous pollutants when run the heating mode for Trombe-wall. This paper proposes a novel solar photo-thermal catalytic hybrid Trombe-wall, which can realize space heating and air purification simultaneously driven by solar energy. The key material in the wall, the photo-thermal composite catalyst MnOx-CeO2/TiO2, which can realize high solar heating and catalytic oxidation performance was prepared. Then, the formaldehyde degradation performance under different formaldehyde concentration, solar radiation intensity and reaction temperature were investigated, and the photo-thermal composite catalytic kinetics were investigated. Finally, the system heat and mass transfer models were established. Then, the thermal and purification performance of hybrid wall was evaluated by comparing with the thermal catalytic Trombe-wall (TC/TW). The results showed that the ratio of photocatalyst to thermal-catalyst was 10%. The composite catalytic materials showed typical photo-thermal synergistic effect under solar radiation, and the activation energy was lower than that of the pure thermal catalysts. The thermal efficiency of system was 36.5%. Although the thermal efficiency of system had a reduction by 1% compared with TC/TW system, but the daily generate clean air was increased by 45.15 m3.