Passive energy management through increased thermal capacitance

Abstract

Energy usage within the world is increasing at a drastic rate. Buildings currently consume a major amount of the total energy used within the United States, and most of this energy usage supports heating and cooling. This demand shows that new passive energy management systems are needed. The use of Increased Thermal Capacitance (ITC) is proposed as a new passive energy management system. To increase thermal capacitance, a piping system is either added into a building's walls or ceiling. In this paper, a building with ITC added is compared to a similar building without ITC using the simulation program TRNSYS. Along with a comparison between the walls and ceiling, several parameters are analyzed for their effect on the performance of the ITC. ITC was found to be effective especially when located in the ceiling, with the location, specific heat and tank size being the most important factors. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A First-Order Study of Reduced Energy Consumption via Increased Thermal Capacitance with Thermal Storage Management in a Micro-Building

“…This thermal storage system saves energy for the entire system by taking advantage of the climate. Using the properties of copper piping found in [3] and the building envelope properties found in [4], it was found that the envelope resistance is 200 times greater than the resistance of the copper pipe; therefore, the copper piping's contribution to the net resistance will be omitted in this first order analysis.…”

“…However, the energy savings due to their ITC methodology were rather modest, not taking full advantage of the weather conditions. In order to improve on the work of Carpenter et al [3], a more advanced thermal management system (TSM) is proposed in this paper. The proposed ITC/TSM discussed in this paper takes advantage of daily maximum or minimum ambient temperatures to control the temperature of the water used in the ITC.…”

“…A fixed additional capacitance could be considered a solely passive method, but the proposed method is semi-passive in that it uses water flowing through pipes in the walls. It has been found that a relatively small mass flow rate flowing through pipes embedded in the walls provides modest energy savings in achieving thermal comfort [3].…”

“…Using transient simulations for a one-room enclosure incorporating an increased thermal capacitance (ITC) system, Carpenter et al [3] determined that the most beneficial placement of the additional capacitance is the ceiling, i.e., to circulate water from a tank through piping embedded in the ceiling. However, the energy savings due to their ITC methodology were rather modest, not taking full advantage of the weather conditions.…”

“…Increased thermal capacitance has been a subject of research for many decades [1][2][3][4]. Researchers such as Madhumathi et al [5] and Zhu et al [6] investigated the use of phase change materials to improve energy consumption due to climate control in dwellings located in hot environments.…”