Trombe Walls - Characteristic, Overview and Simple Case Study for Different Climate Conditions

Abstract

Currently, when we spend a significant part of the day indoors, paying attention to indoor air quality and thermal comfort rise to prominence. Sometimes, improving these issues could be really simple and possible by using passive solar systems like Trombe walls. Because the implementation of solar walls is still problematic due to numerous barriers connecting with a system management or effectiveness in summer or winter period, many of researchers try to find the solutions, which could optimize them. This paper characterizes the main issues of Trombe walls, presents the current state of research on solar walls and provides a simple simulation of a building with a Trombe wall performed in TRNSYS software, for 3 variants of the system and 4 locations with different climatic conditions. It was estimated that system with Trombe wall and control strategies allows the building to maintain thermal comfort for more than 20% of the year, but effectiveness of Trombe walls depends largely on the climatic conditions and they should be considered only as an auxiliary support for HVAC systems.