The Impact of Using Phase Change Material as a Seasonal Energy Storage for Enhancing Thermal Performance of Residential Building’s Envelope

Abstract

Energy consumption in buildings has increased as a result of the heat gain and loss of the building’s envelope. Its materials and layers play an important role in its efficiency. This study aims to provide an environmental solution that contributes to store the heat energy in long-term (seasonally), reducing heat loss and gain, and thus reducing energy consumption, by Using a Sodium Acetate Trihydrate (SAT) phase change material (PCM) and its melting point is (58C) integrated with expanded polystyrene (EPS) thermal insulation material (TIM) on the southern façade of a residential building located in Hebron-Palestine by suggesting different scenarios of the PCM-TIM integration’s layers arrangements and design to select the best scenario in seasonal thermal energy storage (TES) by studying the wall layers before and after adding PCM TIM integration, analyzing, thermal calculations and simulating its thermal performance in summer and winter seasons using Design Builder Software (DB) and Energy Plus engine and simulate the heat flow for the best scenario using ANSYS Fluent software. The results indicated that the use of PCM-TIM integration improved the thermal comfort conditions inside the space, as it was found that the proposed design for M3-A was the best model among all the proposed scenarios in TES and indoor thermal comfort in both summer and winter seasons. This design proved its economic efficiency when it provided annual heating and cooling loads reductions of approximately 72% compared to the CM wall. In terms of cost, this model has proven its economic feasibility with a payback period not exceeding 3 years.