Thermal performance of a window shutter containing PCM: Numerical validation and experimental analysis

Abstract

The present paper describes a numerical and experimental testing of a thermal energy storage system (TES) that contains phase change material (PCM). The definitions and assumptions of the developed numerical models to assess the performance and to simulate the thermal energy behavior are presented. The numerical calculation was performed using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, and a real scale test cell with two window shutters, one with and the other without phase change materials, was used to validate the numerical model. The windows shutters were applied into two similar compartments that were tested and the thermal behavior was analyzed.The numerical models are based on 2D analysis and the indoor temperature comparison between the experimental and the simulated model are evaluated for both compartment models. To validate and evaluate the data agreement of the numerical results were used the most common statistical indexes (based on ASHRAE, IPMVP) and FEMP).According to the used criteria acceptance, the results of the numerical model presented good agreement and reliability, and the numerical model was considered as calibrated with well prediction data.Comparing the temperature improvement and the time delay between both compartments, the compartment with the PCM window shutter (i) decreased the maximum indoor temperature up to 8.7% for the warming period, (ii) increased 16.7% the minimum indoor temperature for the night period and (iii) increased the time delay 1h for the maximum temperature peak and 30min for the minimum temperature peak, compared with the reference compartment.