Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Energy has always been the dominant driving force for the socio-economic development of mankind.Nowadays, the global energy system is highly depended on fossil fuels.A great share of the final energy consumption, over 40%, in the EU-27 is consumed by the existing building stock whereas dwellings account for 66.62% of this.Thus, the need to increase the energy performance of dwellings is an important instrument in the efforts to lessen Europe's energy dependency.In order to define measures to increase the energy performance of dwellings a deeper understanding of their characteristics should be gained.Unfortunately, in Cyprus there is a gap in knowledge on this aspect.In this thesis the characteristics of the dwellings in Cyprus are defined through a sample of 500 dwellings.The results revealed that more than 80% of dwellings in Cyprus do not have thermal insulation installed on their envelope.From this it is clear that the definition of the optimum thermal insulation material to be applied in dwellings is very important.Thus, the commercially available thermal insulation materials and topologies used in Cyprus were reviewed and defined through a market survey and the typical dwelling was modelled.The effect of the application of thermal insulation to its energy behaviour was simulated using TRNSYS.This resulted in the definition of the optimum thermal insulation materials and topologies to be applied in both new and existing dwellings.Accordingly, the application of advanced commercially available materials such as Phase Change Materials (PCM) to the envelope of the typical dwelling was investigated.The energy savings achieved by the addition of a PCM layer on the envelope of the typical dwelling was found to be 28.6%.The optimum PCM case was also combined with the optimum thermal insulation combination and an energy saving of 68% was predicted.
Author: Gregoris Panayiotou
Language: English
Subfield: Building and Construction
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W82799310