Study of a floor supply air conditioning system using granular phase change material to augment building mass thermal storage—Heat response in small scale experiments

We have proposed a new floor supply air conditioning system, using phase change material to augment building mass thermal storage. A scale model was constructed for such a system. Granules containing phase change material (PCM), with a phase change temperature of about 20 °C, were made from foamed glass beads and paraffin waxes. Results from measurements simulating an air conditioning schedule in office buildings indicate that 89% of daily cooling load could be stored each night in a system that used a 30 mm thick packed bed of the granular PCM.