Design and operation methodology for active building-integrated thermal energy storage systems

•A methodology for integrating the design and operation of building-integrated thermal energy storage (BITES) systems.•Heuristic room air temperature set-profile is improved with transfer functions.•A bounding condition based design approach is presented.•Dynamic response of different BITES system configurations is analyzed and presented.

A methodology is presented for integrating the design and operation of active building-integrated thermal energy storage (BITES) systems to enhance their thermal and energy performance. A bounding-condition based design approach is proposed in conjunction with predictive control strategies. The predictive control uses frequency domain models and room air temperature set-point profile as input. The set-point profiles and BITES design are improved in a holistic manner according to the thermal dynamic response of active BITES systems and their thermal zones. The dynamic response is obtained from the transfer functions of frequency domain models. The methodology is demonstrated on ventilated systems. The results show that the methodology can significantly improve the design and operation of active BITES systems, and hence improve their thermal and energy performance. The dynamic response of different sizes of systems is presented to provide useful information for design selection. It is shown that concrete thickness of 0.2–0.3 m is a good value to initiate design. Other important application considerations are also discussed.