Experimental validation of a methodology to assess PCM effectiveness in cooling building envelopes passively
Issue date
2014Suggested citation
Castell, Albert;
Farid, Mohammed M.;
.
(2014)
.
Experimental validation of a methodology to assess PCM effectiveness in cooling building envelopes passively.
Energy and Buildings, 2014, vol. 81, p. 59-71.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2014.06.011.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Energy consumption presents increasing trends during last decades, presenting a great challenge. The
building sector contributes to a high proportion of the energy consumed and therefore efforts should be
focused to improve energy efficiency of buildings. For such purpose, the use of phase change materials in
building envelopes has been extensively studied and its benefits were demonstrated. However, there is a
lack of simple evaluation tools to assess these benefits. In this paper a previously proposed methodology
based on four indicators, which were tested through simulation only are experimentally validated using
brick, concrete and timber constructions, incorporating PCM. Results show that the methodology is successful
for buildings with heat gains and having low thermal inertia or insulation. However, for highly
insulated buildings with significant inertia and low heat gains the method fails to assess the potential
benefit of the PCM. Moreover, the ITD indicator is found to be the most accurate in assessing PCM benefits
compared to other parameters studied. In this paper the ITD indicator will be modified to take into
account an upper and lower comfort temperature levels rather than single set temperature.