Analysis of solar radiation heat transfer of architectural fabric membrane material

Abstract

In recent years, the application of membrane structures in industrial storage buildings has been widely praised due to its light weight, high transparency, self-cleaning, and other advantages. The textile membranes consist of polyester fiber substrate and polyvinyl chloride or polyvinylidene fluoride flame-retardant coatings. It occupies the main market of architectural membrane materials in China. However, the fabric membrane material has high heat transfer coefficient, poor thermal insulation, and high light transmittance performance, being affected significantly by solar radiation intensity. These thermal optical properties are lead to a poor indoor thermal environment of industrial storage buildings. This article aims to overcome the difficulties in analyzing the fabric membrane materials solar radiation heat transfer. The complexity of heat transfer is mainly caused by the hourly solar radiation and the curved roofing of fabric membrane structure industrial storage building. Therefore, a solar radiation heat transfer model was established using MATLAB program. In this article, the different directions hourly heat gained of an actual membrane structures storage building located at Wuhan in China was calculated. The calculation results of solar radiation heat gained between the grid generation method with MATLAB and the projection method were compared. This study may provide a reference for analyze the solar radiation heat transfer and design of the practical fabric membrane structures building application.