ENERGETIC EFFECTS OF FLOW-THROUGH WALL ELEMENTS WITH PHASE-CHANGE MATERIALS FOR BUILDING COMPONENT ACTIVATION

摘要

The energy efficiency of buildings is important. In order to reduce the energy demand for heating and cooling,a previously proposed flow-through wall element is enhanced with phase-change materials (PCM). By meansof numerical modelling and simulation, the energetic effects of the wall element are studied for different cities (i.e., climatic conditions), flow speeds through the wall element, and phase-fraction as well as properties ofthe phase-change material. Simulations at sufficiently small time steps for an entire year allow to determinethe maximum heating and cooling loads, with their respective annual energies by integration. The resultsrevealed that the PCM-enhanced wall element is beneficial for most of the conditions and cities. Especially,the cooling loads can be reduced significantly compared to wall elements without PCM. The annual primaryenergy consumption, comprising heating, cooling and operation of the wall element has a minimum at flowspeeds of approx. 1 m/s.