Design and experimental evaluation of phase change material based cooling ceiling system

Abstract

This article deals with the possibility of using PCMs in cooling ceiling systems to reduce significantly air temperature fluctuations and energy demands for cooling. The PCM-based cooling ceiling's technical design was performed, and a prototype was realized in this research. The experimental verification of the proposed system was performed to determine the actual parameters in different operational modes and their comparison with the same cooling ceiling system without PCM. The transient simulations in the TRNSYS simulation software were also carried out and validated with experiments. Based on the findings, the complex simulations were performed for application under the specific climatic conditions of Czechia. This work contains a comprehensive approach from the prototype design, through the experiments and partial simulations, to complex simulations based on the specific parameters and an economic evaluation. The results of this work show the ability of the proposed cooling ceiling solution to reduce temperature peaks by up to 3.2 °C, while energy savings can be up to 27%, depending on the air change rate. These results can also help significantly determine the economic feasibility of a PCM-based solution for ceiling cooling systems. © 2021