This paper reviews the previous work on phase change cold storage for air-conditioning systems focusing on two aspects including phase change materials (PCMs) and applications. Besides the studies on phase change cold storage devices, the typical air-conditioning systems with cold storage are...

Solar cooling technology is environmentally friendly and contributes to a significant decrease of the CO2 emissions which cause the green house effect. Currently, most of the solar cooling systems commonly used are the hot water driven lithium bromide absorption chillers. According to the...

As a simple and practical bioclimatic design methodology, solar chimneys are receiving considerable attention for reducing heat gain and inducing natural cooling or heating in both commercial and residential buildings because of their potential benefits in terms of operational cost, energy...

Solar energy is receiving much more attentions in building energy systems in recent years. Solar thermal utilization should be based on the integration of solar collectors into buildings. The facades of buildings can be important solar collectors, and therefore become multifunctional. In...

In the past decades, solar water collectors were installed for the main purpose of preheating domestic hot water or to cover a fraction of the space heating demand in China. However, solar cooling systems were constructed just for demonstration purposes. Since the building of the first...

During the past few decades, a large number of ground-coupled heat pump (GCHP) systems have been widely applied in various buildings around the world due to the attractive advantages of high efficiency and environmental friendliness. However, most buildings in warm-climate or cold-climate areas...

This paper presents a review on transportation of heat energy over long distance. For the transportation of high-temperature heat energy, the chemical catalytic reversible reaction is almost the only way available, and there are several reactions have been studied. For the relatively...

Rotary desiccant wheel cooling system operates on the principle of adsorption dehumidification and evaporative cooling. The system adopts natural substance as working fluid and can be driven by low grade thermal energy such as solar energy. Due to these merits, solar powered rotary desiccant...

To sufficiently store and use high-quality heat energy, thermal stratification is gradually applied in many kinds of energy storage fields such as solar thermal utilization system. Because of the unsteady characteristics of solar radiation, thermal storage becomes very essential in long-term...

In the solid desiccant wheel air-conditioning system, the performance of the desiccant wheel is critical to the capability, size and cost of the whole system. Constructing mathematical model is an effective method for analyzing the performance of the rotary wheel as well as the system. The model...