Phase change material cool storage for a Swedish Passive House

Passive Houses have gained popularity the last 10 years as a way of improving the energy efficiency in the housing stock. The combination of a highly insulating building envelope and large solar heat gains summertime can, however, result in excessive temperatures. The aim of this paper is to evaluate a comfort cooling strategy for attaining good indoor climate summertime while maintaining good energy efficiency. The studied strategy is a night cool storage with phase change material (PCM). To evaluate this, a Matlab code was used for the analysis of climate files along with the thermodynamical properties of PCM storages and then used with IDA Indoor Climate and Energy for building simulations. The building model is based on an actual Passive House in the district of Lambohov in Linköping, Sweden, where continuous logging of temperatures are available. Without comfort cooling the simulations show excessive temperatures summertime, which is consistent with the field measurements from the actual house. The results show that the PCM can remove a substantial share of the degree hours with excessive temperatures.

► An actual Passive House is simulated during the summer.
► The simulated results show excessive temperatures consistent with field measurements.
► A phase change material cool storage is implemented in the model.
► This cooling strategy removes a substantial share of the excessive temperatures.