SMART HEATING OF RESIDENTIAL SECTOR USING HEATING PANELS

Abstract

The motivation for this thesis lies in the problem of global warming that people are facing nowadays. Due to human activities through the burning of fossil fuels resulting in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, the temperature continues to rise and is expected to increase by another 2.4°C by the year 2050. To prevent this problem, people are now focusing on reducing energy consumption as it uses fossil fuels. The residential sector is one of the largest energy consumers, especially for space heating, as people spend most of their lives indoors. Therefore, this thesis presents a new approach for space heating with occupants. The main idea is to design a focused heating panel placed on the ceiling at a reasonable distance from the occupant's head. This heating system directly heats only the occupant and not the rest of the environment in the room. In this numerical study, the CFD simulation was implemented with a manikin to analyze the performance of two different systems on the occupant under winter conditions. The experimental data and the setup model were adopted from the research study for the benchmark scenario. After achieving good performance in discretizing the model, three scenarios with heating systems were used. The main parameter to be achieved in all three cases was Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Predicted Percentage Dissatisfied (PPD) to create a comfortable environment in the room. All scenarios with the heating system complied with ASHRAE Standard 55-2017 and ISO 7730, except for case 1 with the ventilation system. However, the conventional type of space heating was 6.9% more energy efficient than the proposed heating approach.