Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

Among all of the internal fabric and external enclosure components of buildings, sloped roofs and adjacent attics are often the most dynamic areas. Roofs are exposed to high temperature fluctuations and intense solar radiation that are subject to seasonal changes in climatic conditions. Following the currently rising interests in demand-side management, building energy dynamics, and the thermal response characteristics of building components, this paper contains unpublished results from past studies that focused on innovative roof and attic configurations. The authors share unique design strategies that yield significant reduction of daytime roof peak temperatures, thermal-load shavings, and up to a ten-hour shift of the peak load period. Furthermore, advance configurations of the roofs and attics that are discussed in this paper enable over 90% reductions in roof-generated peak-hour cooling loads and sometimes close to 50% reductions in overall roof-generated cooling loads as compared with traditionally constructed roofs with the same or similar levels of thermal insulation. It is expected that the proposed new roof design schemes could support the effective management of dynamic energy demand in future buildings.

roofs and attics, thermal performance, numerical analysis, field testing, dynamic thermal response, peak load management, thermal storage, phase change materials

Experimental and theoretical analyses have been performed to determine dynamic thermal characteristics of fiber insulations containing microencapsulated phase change material (PCM). It was followed by a series of transient computer simulations to investigate the performance of a wood-framed wall assembly with PCM-enhanced fiber insulation in different climatic conditions. A novel lab-scale testing procedure with use of the heat flow meter apparatus (HFMA) was introduced in 2009 for the analysis of dynamic thermal characteristics of PCM-enhanced materials. Today, test data on these characteristics is necessary for whole-building simulations, energy analysis, and energy code work. The transient characteristics of PCM-enhanced products depend on the PCM content and a quality of the PCM carrier. In the past, the only existing readily-available method of thermal evaluation of PCMs utilized the differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) methodology. Unfortunately, this method required small and relatively uniform test specimens. This requirement is unrealistic in the case of many PCM-enhanced building envelope products. Small specimens are not representative of PCM-based blends, since these materials are not homogeneous. In this paper, dynamic thermal properties of materials, in which phase change processes occur, are analyzed based on a recently-upgraded dynamic experimental procedure: using the conventional HFMA. In order to theoretically analyze performance of these materials, an integral formula for the total heat flow in finite time interval, across the surface of a wall containing the phase change material, was derived. In numerical analysis of the southern-oriented wall the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) weather data was used for the summer hot period between June 30th and July 3rd. In these simulations the following three climatic locations were used: Warsaw, Poland, Marseille, France, and Cairo, Egypt. It was found that for internal temperature of 24 °C, peak-hour heat gains were reduced by 23–37% for Marseille and 21–25% for Cairo; similar effects were observed for Warsaw.

Different types of Phase Change Materials (PCMs) have been tested as dynamic components in buildings for at least 4 decades. Most of historical studies have found that PCMs enhance building energy performance. The PCMs store energy and alter the temperature gradient through the insulated cavity because they remain at a nearly constant temperature during the melting and solidifying stages. The use of organic PCMs to enhance the performance of thermal insulation in the building envelope was studied at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during 2000 – 2009. PCMs reduce heat flow across an insulated region by absorbing and desorbing heat (charging and discharging) in response to ambient temperature cycles. The amount of heat that can be stored in PCMs is directly related to the heat of fusion of the material, which is between 116 J/g to 163 J/g (or 50 to 70 Btu/lb) for the most - popular micro encapsulated paraffinic PCMs, or fatty acid materials used in this research. This paper presents experimental and numerical results from the long-term thermal performance study focused on blown fiber glass insulation modified with a novel spray-applied micro encapsulated PCM. Experimental results are reported for both laboratory - scale and full - size building elements tested in the field. Test work was followed by detailed whole building Energy Plus simulations in order to generate energy performance data for different US climates.