Phase Change Material (PCM) - Enhanced Envelopes for Energy-efficient Commerical Buildings

Download or read book Phase Change Material (PCM) - Enhanced Envelopes for Energy-efficient Commerical Buildings written by Peña Victoria Louremy and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The building sector is the largest consumer of energy in the United States, and accounts for nearly 40 percent of the total U.S. primary energy use, surpassing the transportation and industry sectors [1]. Due to the sheer magnitude of the commercial building energy consumption and the increasing annual growth of energy consumed per year there have been numerous efforts over the past three decades to design buildings with lower energy intensity [1]. In this thesis, the favorable thermal properties of the building envelope materials known as phase change materials (PCM) were investigated to reduce the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) loads of simulated commercial buildings. To examine the performance of PCMs, the thermal properties of an organic PCM sample were embedded into the exterior building envelope of a strip mall building model from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the EnergyPlus Building Energy Simulation Program (BESP) for three different climate zones. Collectively, the PCM-enhanced roofing and exterior wall construction installed in the EnergyPlus mercantile strip mall building model had minimal impacts on the annual building energy consumption. Opportunities for future research on PCM-enhanced building envelope construction exist in the use of isothermal step mode rather than traditional dynamic mode for the DSC testing of PCMs, the development of a PCM BESP component that allows for the consideration of both phase change processes enthalpy curves, and large scale field testing of PCMs in place.