Analisys of the Energy Performance of Sunspaces: A New Method
Abstract
Environmental sustainability is an important issue concerning most of all building design and construction. An efficient system to decrease energy requirements during the heating season is the use of passive solar devices, among them integrated sunspaces. The research presented in this paper deals with: 1. the comparison of different methods used to calculate energy behaviour of sunspaces, in particular their contribution to living space heating; 2. the development of these methods in order to achieve results closer to real situation. This paper marks an intermediate stage in a work that is still in progress. The main goal is to develop a theoretical system and to find the parameters to be controlled in order to compare the energy performance of real sunspaces with the one of scale models. In this way, it is possible to build scale models (less expensive and easily to manage) and to verify the design assumption with in field preliminary tests. In order to get scale models into proportion and to manage correctly the results of the monitoring campaign, the changing of the physical quantities concerning the sunspace thermal behaviour has been theoretically studied while the model linear dimensions are reduced. Particular attention is given to radiative heat exchange among internal and external surfaces. Finally, the comparison of the results are presented and discussed.