0E-BUILDINGS · Open Access Platform for Zero-Energy Buildings
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-09-02 → 2023-09-01
- EU contribution
- €174,806
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Open Access Platform for Zero-Energy Buildings
Achieving energy-efficient buildings has become a major global challenge for science and industry due to the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings currently contribute to over a third of global energy consumption and nearly 40% of CO2 emissions. The EU recognizes improving building efficiency is crucial in achieving climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. Among the various available technologies for improving building energy efficiency, innovative thermal energy storage solutions show enormous potential for energy savings. Particularly in the last decade, phase change materials (PCMs) have attracted great attention from the construction sector because of their high energy storage density, i.e., large amounts of energy can be stored in small volumes. PCMs undergo a phase transition (solid-liquid or liquid-solid) around a narrow region of utilization temperatures, through which they can store (during melting) and release (during solidification) large amounts of heat energy. However, to achieve an effective use of passive PCM systems in buildings, a proper design of their thermophysical properties, their quantities, and their location is required. Moreover, such features are highly influenced by the climate conditions where a building is located and its typology. Therefore, given the complexity of building thermal behavior, the thermophysical phenomena of PCMs integrated into a building need to be analyzed through novel whole-building performance simulation (BPS) tools. Within this context, the main aim of the 0E-BUILDINGS project was to propose and develop a novel simulation-based multi-objective platform to evaluate and optimize the energy performance of buildings through the optimal use of passive PCM systems. Beyond this, the present project also allowed to employ the developed numerical tools for determining innovative building applications with PCMs, understanding their thermal behavior in buildings, deriving design guidelines, enhancing their cooling and heating performances, and optimizing their designs through an integral combination with architectural variables and other passive cooling and heating strategies.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The European Union (EU) has proposed themselves ambitious goals to considerably reduce greenhouse emissions and move to an energy-neutral built environment in 2050. To achieve this, it is planned to ensure that new buildings have to be nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (nZEB) as well as the gradual retrofitting of the existing ones to be nZEB. Passive strategies like the use of phase change materials (PCMs) included in the building structure is a promising technology to achieve nZEB designs. However, its effectiveness is difficult to guarantee because of the complex thermal behavior of buildings. Within this context, building performance simulation (BPS) is vital to evaluate building physics in an integrated manner, including all the heat and mass transfer phenomena because of the local climate as well as their relation to users’ behavior and the operation of equipment installed in the building. The 0E-BUILDINGS (Open-Access Platform for Zero-Energy Buildings) project proposes a new multi-objective computational platform to evaluate and optimize PCM-based building components aiming to design new nZEB or to retrofit the existing ones to be nZEB. Through its simulation-based optimization approach, this platform offers a reliable optimal design of PCMs, in terms of thermo-physical properties, quantities, and locations, in order to guarantee their effectiveness.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT DARMSTADT · DarmstadtCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union