Reduction of household energy consumption with innovative energy storage in building structure

Abstract

By reducing the energy requirements for cooling and heating, thermal energy storage (TES) with phase change materials (PCMs) offers a lot of promise to provide thermal comfort in buildings. Because of its latent heat property, phase change material has a high energy density. The building uses for phase change materials include space heating/cooling, waste heat recovery, solar water heating, and power generation. Thermal energy storage with phase change materials has been proven in research to be useful for reducing peak electricity demand or increasing energy efficiency in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The primary grid benefit of thermal energy storage is load shifting and shedding, which is accomplished by recharging the storage system during off-peak times and substituting heating, ventilation, and air conditioning operation during peak times. Shifting HVAC system operations to times when the system can function more efficiently and at a reduced cost provides additional efficiency benefits. The application of phase change materials has been demonstrated by simulating the energy demand of an apartment building with and without the application of four (04) different PCM materials. It was found that PCM could store thermal energy and reduce energy demand in both heating and cooling scenarios. Furthermore, to understand the inside of PCM and how it stores energy, a detailed investigation of transient natural convection heat transfer during melting and solidification processes inside an energy storage module during the energy storage process was performed. The energy storage module consists of a cylindrical shell filled with a phase change material (PCM). The computed results were used to develop valuable correlations for the design of thermal control systems.