ABSTRACT
Light envelopes are more and more used in modern buildings but they don’t present sufficient thermal inertia. A solution to increase this inertia is to incorporate a Phase Change Material (PCM) in this envelope. This paper presents the performance of a test-cell submitted to climatic variations with a new structure of light wallboards containing PCMs and a comparison is made with a test-cell without PCMs. To improve the wallboard efficiency a Vacuum Insulation Panel (VIP) was associated to the PCM panel. An experimental study was carried out by measuring the indoor temperature, the wall surface temperatures and the heat fluxes through the wallboards. A numerical simulation with the TRNSYS software was carried out in adding a new module representing the new wallboard. It showed a good agreement with experimental results. This new tool will allow users to simulate the thermal behaviour of buildings having walls with PCMs.
