Summary: | The use of an attached sunspace is one of the most popular passive solar heating techniques. One of the main drawbacks of the sunspace is getting over heated by the sun energy during the hot season of the year. Even in northern climates overheating could be problematic and there is a considerable cooling demand. Shading is one of the most efficient and cost effective strategies to avoid overheating due to the high irradiation especially in the summer. Another strategy is using ventilation system to remove the excess heat inside the sunspace. However this rejected energy can be captured and stored for future energy demands of the sunspace itself or nearby buildings. Therefore the Solar blind system has been considered here for the shielding purpose in order to reduce the cooling demand. By considering the PV/T panels as the solar blind, the blocked solar energy will be collected and stored for covering part of the heating demand and the domestic hot water supplies of the adjacent building. From a modeling point of view, the sunspace can be considered as a small-scale closed greenhouse. In the closed greenhouse concept, available excess heat is indeed utilized in order to supply the heating demand of the greenhouse itself as well as neighboring buildings. The energy captured by PV/T collectors and the excess heat from the sunspace then will be stored in a thermal energy storage system to cover the daily and seasonal energy demand of the attached building. In the present study, a residential building with an attached sunspace with height, length and width of 3, 12 and 3.5 meters respectively has been assumed located in two different locations, Stockholm and Rome. Simulations have been run for the Solar blind system integrated with a short-term and a long-term TES systems during a year to investigate the influence of the sunspace equipped with a PV/T Solar blind on the thermal behavior of the adjacent building. The simulated results show that the Solar blind system can be an appropriate and effective solution for avoiding overheating problems in sunspace and simultaneously produce and store significant amount of thermal energy and electricity power which leads to saving considerable amount of money during a year.
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