Experimental investigation of PCM thermal energy storage system for office ventilation

The topic of the thesis concerns a system installed at the faculty of Engineering in Ljubljana, composed of a solar air collector and a LHTES (latent heat thermal energy storage) unit, constituted by PCM (phase changing material) plates, which is used for office ventilation. The system has been designed to carry out experiments and to verify the savings that could be obtained for indoor ventilation. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate directly the system with temperature and velocity measurements and to compare the data obtained through experimentation with the results of the simulated system in TRNSYS software with the purpose of validating the results of the software. Validation is carried out either for the PCM system and for the solar air collector. Once the results have been validated, it has been simulated the behavior of the system throughout the entire heating season with the software so to verify the overall energy savings. Furthermore, the behavior throughout the overall heating season has been evaluated also after the integration of an air recuperator in the previous virtual system so to verify the possible additional energy savings brought from it.