Behaviour of a concrete wall containing micro‐encapsulated PCM after a decade of its construction

Abstract

Today, our society has the duty of reducing the energy consumed in the building sector. A promising technology to achieve this goal is the implementation of thermal energy storage (TES) solutions in buildings envelope. Lately, much literature dealing with the effect of the inclusion of latent heat storage materials in construction materials to provide higher thermal inertia has appeared, mostly focusing on the evaluation of the thermal properties, density, or porosity of these new materials. However, few of them evaluated the long stability properties of the materials with embedded PCM when included in a building, very much needed since the lifetime of a building is about 50 years. Therefore, in this study, an evaluation of a house‐like cubicle of concrete with micro‐encapsulated PCM after a decade of its construction is carried out. The results are compared to the tests done in 2005 concluding that the thermal performance of this cubicle presented no degradation in the PCM effect.

The work partially funded by the Spanish Government (ENE2015‐64117‐C5‐1‐R (MINECO/FEDER), ULLE10‐4E‐1305, and ENE2005‐08256‐C02‐01). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group (2014 SGR 123) and the city hall of Puigverd de Lleida. GREiA is certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. Financiado por el proyecto RTC‐2015‐3583‐5 (INPHASE) del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, dentro del Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, en el marco del Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013‐2016, y ha sido cofinanciado con FONDOS FEDER, con el objetivo de promover el desarrollo tecnológico, la innovación y una investigación de calidad.