Influence of internal thermal mass on the indoor thermal dynamics and integration of phase change materials in furniture for building energy storage: A review

By H. Johra, P. Heiselberg. 2017

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The increasing share of intermittent renewable energy on the grid encourages researchers to develop demand-side management strategies. Passive heat storage in the indoor space is a promising solution to improve the building energy flexibility. It relies on an accurate control of the transient building temperature. However, many of the current numerical models for building energy systems assume empty rooms and do not account entirely for the internal thermal inertia of objects like furniture. This review article points out that such assumption is not valid for dynamic calculations. The furnishing elements and other internal content can have a significant impact on the indoor thermal dynamics and on the occupants’ comfort. There is a clear lack of guidance and studies about the thermo-physical properties of this internal mass. Therefore, this paper suggests representative values for the furniture/indoor thermal mass parameters and presents the different available modelling technics. In addition, the large exposed surface area of furniture pieces offers a good potential for the integration of phase change materials. It can highly increase the effective thermal inertia of light frame buildings without any construction work.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbc7b29d95b09ccb18dea0e288f27a2191aa9972

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Building and Construction

1. Denvid Lau
2. Qiwen Qiu

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Jalal Faraj
2. Denvid Lau
3. Mahmoud Khaled
4. Khaireldin Faraj
5. Qiwen Qiu
6. Jiayu Chen
7. F. Hachem
8. C. Castelain

Citations in the corpus

• Piezoelectric materials for sustainable building structures: Fundamentals and applications (2019, background): “From recent literature [4,5], it is estimated that building energy has been reported to occupy about 35% of total energy consumption worldwide.”
• A review on phase change materials for thermal energy storage in buildings: Heating and hybrid applications (2020, background): “Alva et al. [65] who prepared an overview on thermal energy storage systems, where the study reviewed different TES types: Sensible, latent and chemical storage systems; Guo et al. [66] who reviewed the utilization of hybrid renewable energy systems, Gracia et al. [59] who analyzed the lessons learn”