Augmenting natural ventilation using solar heat and free cool energy for residential buildings

Abstract

In many urban buildings ventilation is not sufficient that will increase the temperature and also create unhealthy atmosphere inside the room. In such buildings artificially induced ventilation through freely available energy promote comfort conditions by reducing the temperature by 2 to 3°C and also creating good circulation of fresh air inside the room. In the present work the concept of improving the ventilation by excess hot energy available during summer days from the solar flat plate collector and by storing cool energy available during the early morning hour in the Phase Change Material (PCM) based storage system is attempted. An experimental setup is made to study the effect of improvement in natural ventilation and the results are reported. A visible reduction in temperature is observed through circulation of air from the bottom side of the room to the roof of the house using the stored hot and cool energy. A CFD analysis is also carried out using ANSYS-CFX software to simulate and evaluate the mass flow of air at the inlet and at the selected RTD location by matching the transient temperature profile of the simulated result with the experimental results at the selected RTD location.

Keywords

• Energy Conservation
• Free cool energy
• Green building concept
• Natural ventilation
• Solar heating system