Solar Steel Sandwich Panels for Industrial and Commercial Buildings: System Simulations and Potential Analysis
Abstract
Building integration can improve the architectural and aesthetical quality of solar installations and reduce their cost. The development and performance assessment of solar steel sandwich panels for the use in industrial and commercial buildings have been already demonstrated in previous works. The present paper analyses the behavior of the panels for the assistance of ground-coupled heat pump systems by means of simulations with TRNSYS, focusing on the energetic regeneration of the geothermal source. The results show that the combination with solar panels can slightly improve the energy performance of well-designed systems (+5%), but significantly affects the efficiency of systems with undersized borehole heat exchangers. Solar regeneration enables to reduce the length or the number of the boreholes by 25 % to 30 % and the area necessary for their installation up to 80 %.