The use of night cooling ventilation in addition of phase change materials (PCMs) is a very powerful strategy for reducing the cooling demand of buildings. Nevertheless, there are inherent drawbacks in the way things have been doing so far: (a) The limited area of contact between PCM and the...

Today, green roofs are a building system which provides interesting benefits over traditional roof solutions. The most important advantages are the reduction of surface runoff in cities, improvement of the urban climate, biodiversity support, improvement of the durability of roofing materials,...

In a recent meeting of IEA's Annex 23, several members presented their conclusions on the modeling of phase change materials behavior in the context of building applications. These conclusions were in agreement with those of a vast review, involving the survey of more than 250 journal papers,...

Sandwich panels are a good option as building materials, as they offer excellent characteristics in a modular system. The goal of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of using the microencapsulated PCM (Micronal BASF) in sandwich panels to increase their thermal inertia and to reduce...

The goal of this study is to implement and to test a thermal energy storage (TES) system using different phase change materials (PCM) for solar cooling applications. A high temperature pilot plant able to test different types of TES systems and materials was designed and built at the University...

The present work compares the environmental impact of three different thermal energy storage (TES) systems for solar power plants. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for these systems is developed: sensible heat storage both in solid (high temperature concrete) and liquid (molten salts) thermal...

Thermal energy storage systems which keep warm and cold water separated by means of gravitational stratification have been found to be attractive in low and medium temperature thermal storage applications due to their simplicity and low cost. This effect is known as thermal stratification, and...

This review summarizes and organizes the literature on life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) and life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) studies carried out for environmental evaluation of buildings and building related industry and sector (including construction products,...

The use of double skin facades (DSF) in the building sector and its thermal benefits have been widely studied numerically over the last 30 years. These modelling and simulations are based on different typologies, which have evolved altogether with the available computational resources. The...

To investigate heat demand, one can usually base the estimation on sales data for the energy carriers or even use the data directly. This works for companies, regions, towns and sectors (e.g., industry or domestic sector). But for the waste heat produced by the industry it is not that simple:...