Our colleagues at UNIFE have published an article in the Tecnica Italiana – Italian Journal of Engineering Science on the installation of the small scale prototype.
The paper presents the state-of-the-art of the ongoing IDEAS research project, funded under the Horizon 2020 EU framework programme. The project involves fourteen partners from six European countries and proposes a multi-source cost-effective renewable energy system for the decarbonisation of the building envelope. The system features a radiant floor fed by a heat pump for the building thermal management. The heat pump can exploit sun, air, and/or ground as thermal sources through the use of photovoltaic/thermal solar panels, air heat exchangers, and shallow ground flat-panel heat exchangers. Thermal energy storage is achieved by means of phase change materials spread along several system components, such as: radiant floor to increase its thermal inertia, solar panels for cooling purposes, ground to enhance soil thermal capacity. Within the project framework, a small-scale building, featuring a plethora of sensors for test purposes, and two large-scale buildings are meant to be equipped with the renewable energy system proposed. The small-scale building is currently in operation, and the first results are discussed in the present work. Preliminary data suggest that while multi-source systems coupled with heat pumps are particularly effective, it is complex to obtain suitable thermal energy storage on urban scale.
The paper which is open access is available here: http://www.iieta.org/journals/ti-ijes/paper/10.18280/ti-ijes.650102