Energy saving potential of buildings integrated with phase change material in hot, arid climate zone

Abstract

Phase change materials are used to decrease energy cost, dependency on fossil fuels and make the buildings energy efficient. The main aim of this study is to carry out parametric study in BWh zone of Koppen-Geiger climate classification in order to evaluate the hypothesis that a single PCM or a group of PCMs (in the narrow) can be used for the whole BWh climate zone. Hence, the energy performance of two-storey PCM integrated residential building located in eight different cities (Abu- Dhabi, Dubai, Faisalabad, Mecca, Jodhpur, Nouakchott, Cairo and Biskra) from BWh Koppen-Geiger classification was evaluated using the most representative building envelope. Also, the impact of meteorological factors like temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, solar radiance on energy saving have been evaluated. Numerical simulations were performed with thirteen different phase change ranges in DesignBuilder software, which uses EnergyPlus as its calculation engine. According to the test results, the optimum PCMs were able to reduce the temperature fluctuations and the maximum temperature reduced by up to 4.64C. The monthly energy savings results showed that different PCMs were found to be optimum in different months of the year. Except for Cairo and Biskra,