Abstract:The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive report on the state of the art on the technologies used in the modeling of energy storage systems by latent heat in buildings, and draw lines on perspectives on the technology evolution in this sector. In the first part, the emphasis is put mainly on the two main lines of research: experimental and numerical. In the second part, the main trends of research in this sector have been followed. An anatomical operation of more than 100 documents (published between 2006 and 2016), on the behavior of storage systems integrating Phase Change Materials (PCM), covering a large number of configurations treatment and their applications in thermal comfort of buildings area, has shown that the information published in this topic are very diverse and enormous, but in many cases are insufficient. The results show that, with suitable design, the PCM can contribute to the reduction of costs and achieve energy reductions in buildings, guaranteeing a comfortable interior environment. The evaluation of this multitude of documents gave the following remark: The effectiveness of any proposed approach to a numerical study is a concept with ambiguities, depending upon the method used, its precision, the problem to be modeled, the convergence criteria and the input parameters choice. The diversity of experimental conditions and the variety of results revealed that the published works are not directly comparable.

Based on energy conservation equations, a heat transfer model has been performed and numerically solved to study the thermal response of a brick filled of phase change materials (PCM-brick). Energy conservation equations have been developed and discretized. A simulation platform has been developed to produce dynamic simulations of incorporated PCM thermal behavior. The developed tool permits to carry out simulations for several materials that are included in the associated database. The behavior of the temperature inside of the PCM-brick has been evaluated and compared to that of an empty hollow brick. The effects of PCM type, incorporated quantity and location within the brick on the thermal response of this structure have been discussed.