Thermal Behaviour of a Dwelling Heated by Different Heating Systems

In a house, the choice of the heating mode is an important factor to ensure the thermal comfort of occupants in the winter period. This choice can also contribute to reduce heating needs resulting in a reduction of energy consumption and also a reduction of greenhouse gases emissions. We present in this article a numerical simulation of the thermal behaviour of the indoors air flow, using a Computational Fluid Dynamics software. The main objective of this paper is the evaluation of the thermal comfort in the dwelling through temperature profiles of the ambient air in a room heated by various systems (floor heating, hot air blowing heating and radiator heating) using the same heating power. The results were used to predict the overall thermal comfort in the dwelling model for all the three heating cases. They have shown that for the same heat power in the dwelling, the average indoors temperature is 19.7 °C for radiator heating, 20.4 °C for the low temperature floor heating and 20 °C for the electric heat pump heating.