Numerical Study on the Thermal Performance of Trombe Wall for Passive Solar Building in Semiarid Climate
The largest amount of energy in buildings is consumed to provide heating, cooling, and ventilation. Therefore, a practical solution such as using renewable energy sources can be considered to reduce energy costs and pollutants. In addition, architecture principles must be varied to utilize passive solar energy and also to reduce energy losses. In this research, a numerical study is presented to investigate the thermal behavior of TW-FR (Trombe Wall Placed in a Fenestrated Room) in the semiarid region of Tunisia.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of fluid flow and heat transfer shows good agreement with published data in literature. The thermal comfort level was calculated according to ASHRAE (55-2013). The results show that (i) the normal
Trombe wall cannot assure an satisfactory comfort level even in summer conditions and a higher vertical temperature gradient can take a value of 15°C, and the Trombe wall is shown to be more efficient in heating mode in the studied semi-arid region compared to cooling; (ii) the operative temperature for the coldest winter is between 17.85 and 19.85°C. The air temperature gradient in the comfort ranges between the head and feet is 2.3°C; and (iii) the Trombe wall is an excellent solution for Sousse city weather; it is suggested that the passive system (TW-FR) will be examined for a whole year to have a precise evaluation of its efficiency.
The following remarks can be concluded from this paper:
(i) The CFD simulation is able to provide accurate air temperature and velocity distributions inside the building room.
(ii) It was observed from the simulations that installing the Trombe wall can highly influence the temperature distribution inside the modeled house for Sousse city weather information.
(iii) It was shown that installing the Trombe wall had significant influence on the temperature of the room that it was kept around 20°C in winter conditions.
(iv) However, in summer conditions, a normal Trombe wall can be considered an additional source of heating for the building.
(v) The typical Trombe wall cannot reduce the effect of heating in the summer season. Consequently, during hot seasons in Tunisia, some modifications in the Trombe wall should be introduced.
International Journal of Photoenergy
Volume 2021, Article ID 6630140, 12 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6630140