Thermal behavior analysis of hollow bricks filled with phase-change material (PCM)

Abstract

Light-weight materials are comprehensively used to reduce the building weight in high-rise or super high-rise buildings, but they will reduce building thermal inertia remarkably, which can increase the air-conditioning load fluctuation and reduce indoor thermal comfortable. According to this condition, phase-change material (PCM) is filled to hollow bricks to improve thermal behavior by latent thermal storage. A numerical model with the heat transfer process of melting-solidifying was built, and a full-scale experiment was done to verify this model. Due to the filled PCM, the thermal performance of hollow bricks was improved obviously from experimental and numerical results. Under suitable phase-change temperature, the filled PCM can reduce the attenuation rate from 13.07% to 0.92%–1.93% and increase the delay time from 3.83 h to 8.83h–9.83 h. Meanwhile, the filled PCM can reduce the peak heat flux from 45.26 W/m2 to 19.19 W/m2-21.4 W/m2, but cannot reduce the average value. In addition, inner cavities were the better choice for PCM and there was an extra phase-change extent of close to 90% in favor of the different outdoor thermal environment. Finally, influence rules of latent heat and thermal conductivity coefficient of PCM were analyzed on temperature and heat flux in inner surfaces.