Advanced fabric energy storage I: Review

Abstract

This is the first of a series of four papers which describe a three-year research project into 'advanced fabric energy storage', which is defined to be the subgroup of fabric-energy-storage systems which pass ventilation air through a structural mass element for the purpose of heat exchange. The technique can reduce or eliminate a building's requirement for mechanical cooling and allow the heating requirement to be demand-shifted to the night-time cheap electricity tariff. The paper presents a literature survey of advanced fabric-energy-storage systems and describes the historical development of the 'FES-slab' - the leading commercial system. Subsequent papers describe the investigation of the slab with a computational-fluid-dynamics model, the theoretical analysis of the cfd results and the incorporation of a slab model into a full-building simulation and, finally, results from experimental monitoring of the first uk building to apply the FES-slab.