The Potential Application of Residential Cooling in the UK and the Role of Thermal Energy Storage Technologies (2007)

Submitted by Raquel Costa on October 17, 2012

This paper is taken from the proceedings of the 2nd PALENC conference and 28th AIVC conference on Building Energy Cooling and Advanced Ventilation Technologies in the 21st Century. It explores the potential cooling demand in a dwelling in the UK and the potential use of solar thermal cooling systems.  As UK Building regulations demand better insulated and more airtight new buildings, the demand for cooling as begun to escalate in UK new build dwellings.

The paper uses ECOTEC building modelling software to model a particular dwelling drawn from generic regional UK housing stock information. From this, the cooling requirement and collector area required to meet the expected demand is calculated.

The paper quantifies that the case study dwelling would have annual cooling demand of 1472 kWh with a peak of 2.1kW. It also calculates that a 9m2 Solar Thermal collector would be sufficient to deliver enough energy to drive an absorption chiller to meet this demand, if a Thermal Energy Storage (TES) component was incorporated into the system.

Author: E. Apatzi, I. Knight - Welsh School of Architecture

Date: 2007