Nowadays, there is an increasing interest in more efficient building materials and new technologies to accomplish the objectives defined by energy policies. The combination of energy efficient building designs and integration of renewable energies makes the use of thermal energy storage (TES) necessary. Within this context, the improvement of building envelopes by the use of phase change materials (PCM) has been widely studied. The PCM selection should fulfil the requirements of the specific application. In this study, a benchmarking of PCM available in the market was performed to undertake a material selection for a specific building application. The incorporation of PCM into a radiant wall technology present several requirements with especial interest on long-term thermal stability. A complete laboratory-scale characterization has been carried out considering the following properties: temperature of phase change, specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and stability.
Financiado por el proyecto RTC-2015-3583-5 (INPHASE) del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, dentro del Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, en el marco del Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013-2016, y ha sido cofinanciado con FONDOS FEDER, con el objetivo de promover el desarrollo tecnológico, la innovación y una investigación de calidad. The work is partially funded by the Spanish government (ENE2015-64117-C5-1-R (MINECO/FEDER) and ENE2015-64117-C5-2-R (MINECO/FEDER)). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group (2017 SGR 1537 and 2017 SGR 188). GREiA is certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. Camila Barreneche would like to thank ACCIO for her Grant TecnioSpring Plus TECSPR17-1-0071. Aran Solé would like to thank Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad de España for Grant Juan de la Cierva FJCI-2015-25741.