The increasing energy demand for space cooling, projected to triple by mid-century and surpassing a quarter of today's global electricity usage, underscores the urgent need for innovative, more energy-efficient air-conditioning technologies. The research introduces phase change material (PCM) embedded radiant cooling (PCM-RCC) as a promising solution, offering enhanced energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. Despite its potential, PCM-RCC remains in the developmental stage, requiring further research to fully unlock its benefits. This work aims to analyse the operational performance of PCM-RCC and develop an advanced rule-based control strategy to enhance its efficiency further. The analysis was conducted using a validated PCM-RCC transient system simulation model. To quantify the advantages of PCM-RCC over typical radiant cooling and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, two reference cases are defined: (1) basic-controlled PCM-RCC, and (2) radiant cooling without PCM. Results reveal that PCM-RCC with advanced control demonstrates higher load flexibility (∼93 % off-peak time operation), 12 % less electricity usage, a 5 % coefficient of performance improvement, and a 30 % decrease in operational costs compared to radiant cooling. Furthermore, the proposed system shows 9 % lower energy usage with a 20 % improvement in thermal comfort compared to basic-controlled PCM-RCC.
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Mousavi et al. (2024) studied this question.
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