Numerical and Experimental Investigations of Composite Solar Walls Integrating Sensible or Latent Heat Thermal Storage

Abstract

This article studies a composite solar wall with latent storage (TES) designed to heat rooms inside buildings during the cold season. No numerical model of the composite solar wall is currently available in the Dymola/Modelica software library. The first objective of this work is to develop one such model. The article describes the elementary components, along with the equations that allow modeling the heat transfers and storage phenomena governing both the thermal behavior and performance of the solar wall. This model was built by assembling various existing basic elements from the software’s “Building” library (e.g., models of heat transfer by convection, radiation and conduction) and then creating new elements, such as the storage element incorporating the phase change material (PCM). To validate this solar wall model, numerical results are compared to experimental data stemming from a small-scale composite solar wall manufactured in our laboratory, and the experimental set-up could be tested under real weather conditions. After verifying the level of confidence in the model, the energy performance of two solar walls, one with a conventional storage wall (sensible heat storage) the other containing a PCM (the same as in the experiment), are compared. The result indicates that the solar wall incorporating a PCM does not in this case release any more energy in the room to be heated.