With the increasing effort to find alternative energy applications, solar energy for the heating of dwellings has been attracting much attention recently. The Trombe wall, which relies on the natural convection and energy storage of its massive thermal wall, is an effective technique to utilize solar energy to decrease the heating load in a building throughout the winter season. In this study, the heat transfer processes and air flow in a Trombe wall were investigated mathematically and numerically, combined with experimental validation. A simplified analytical model of a Trombe wall was developed, with the overall energy balance under quasi-state conditions taken into consideration for a typical winter week in Alexandria, Egypt. With this model, a broad range of geometric parameters was examined to determine the optimal design for a Trombe wall in terms of enhancing the thermal comfort. The optimal Trombe wall derived from the mathematical model, featuring a height of 1.7 m, thickness of 0.3 m for the massive wall, and with a channel depth of 0.22 m. This model could improve the thermal comfort by 38.19% during a typical winter week. Additionally, using DesignBuilder software, thermal and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations were carried out to simulate the proposed Trombe wall design during the entire winter and to predict the space flow pattern in detail, respectively. We achieved reasonable agreement between the mathematical model predictions and the CFD calculations, as well as the experimental results. |
