Objective
Objectives
The project aims at designing, modelling and testing facade and ceiling components to be used for construction or retrofitting of office buildings with good appearance and durability qualities. They must also be able to be produced in industrial scale at minimum cost and provide comfort with significant reduction of energy consumption.
Technical Approach
The project involves the combination of passive components such as fixed sunscreens (which act as barriers for solar energy) or diffusing reflectors, and of active components such as panels or window glazing absorbing the solar radiation and providing heat drawn off from the facade to power a chiller, and chilled ceilings used to control the inside temperature.
As the facade of a current office building is widely open to the visible and infrared sun radiation, it is important to design functional screens which do not cause glare problems but can reflect or dissipate part of the solar energy. These sunscreens will be designed as open core composite panels in order to optimize the different modes of heat dissipation such as reflexion, absorption, radiation and convection.
A complementary active system will also be designed in order to absorb another part of this solar radiation by means of a fluidized glazing in order to provide the power source for an absorption cooler delivering a sufficient amount of chilled fluid. The cooling exchange will take place by means of chilled ceilings which will include:
high reflectivity light diffusing elements for visual comfort in the office structure,
infrared energy absorbing elements acting as cooling surfaces.
Expected Achievements and Exploitation
The outputs of the project will be:
a complete model describing the performances of the system in connection with the characteristics of the individual components in insulation, transmissivity, emissivity, energy storage, ....
the selection of the different components of the passive and active parts, of their assembling and shape,
an experimental testing done at research level and at manufacture level on PASSYS cells (at real scale and under natural sun exposure)
A further development is expected to be the full scale construction of a new office building (or the retrofitting of an existing building), using existing pilot production facilities. After this final validation step the technology will be proposed on a licensing basis.
Fields of science
Not validated
Not validated
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
60761 Montataire
France