Abstract
The traditional approaches employ massive components to moderate temperature fluctuations. The thermo-physical properties of the construction materials will have a strong influence on a building’s energy consumption. Within a passive solar design, the heat capacity of the inner wall layer is dominated. This approach is applicable in locations that have effective daily temperature variations, else that, heavy weight constructions can give rise to problems of excessive thermal mass and cost. The nature of the climate of Iraq can be represented in a two typical seasons; short and cold winter and long, hot and dry summer with short periods of the moderate months. The daily temperature variation is very limited and causes to accumulated heat in the buildings of heavy mass. The use of cooling system, in hot climate, is increased especially with heavy mass constructions. In Iraq, more than 6 million new building unit should be added until 2020, the rapid growth in building sectors become the largest consumer of electric power produced, where the building sector consumes more than 38% from the total energy produced. In this investigation, the phase change materials behaviour was embedded within traditional heavyweight building internal surfaces. The two identical simple single zones modelled and simulated in a professional energy systems program called ESP-r. Global meteorological database software called Meteonorm7 has been used to generate a climate file for Baghdad city (33.3 oN and 44.4oE) into ESP-r program. The results represent a preliminary investigation into the effect of PCM modelling with heavy structured construction under hot climate. In addition, a comparison of an internal surface with different phase change temperature ranges. It is found that the presence of PCM could have a significant effect on the internal surfaces and thus the zone temperatures. The results encourage a full yearly investigation for the tested model, the simulation under realistic operational loads and with fixed internal boundary conditions underneath control loops using appropriate heating, cooling and ventilation strategies.
