Performance Analysis of a Residential Building with Pipe-Embedded Envelopes Coupled with Gshes Toward Low Carbon Emission

Abstract

Utilization of renewable energy to reduce building energy consumption, lower carbon emission and alleviate climate change is essential. This study proposes a residential building with pipe-embedded (PE) envelopes integrated with ground source heat exchangers (GSHEs) to utilize the geothermal energy from shallow soil for intercepting the heat gain and loss through the building envelopes. The real-scale residential building simulation platforms are established in Wuhan, a city in the hot-summer and cold-winter region, to analyze the performance of different cases. The simulation compares three cases with the base case, Case 1 with both PE walls and PE windows, Case 2 with only PE walls, and Case 2 with only PE windows. The results demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improve the thermal environment of the residential building and presents obvious energy saving potential compared to the base case without PE envelopes. The energy saving ratios of Case 1, Case 2, Case 3 in cooling season are 25.2%, 21.5% and 7.9%. The corresponding energy saving ratios in the heating season are 11.8%, 8.2% and 2.8%. The effects of the number of GSHEs on energy saving are also evaluated. The application of PE envelopes also significantly reduce carbon emissions of the HVAC system. Over a lifecycle of 15 years, the total carbon emission reductions due to the equipment manufacturing, refrigerant leakage decrease and energy savings are about 3417 kgCO2, 2970 kgCO2 and 1046 kgCO2, with the corresponding reduction ratios of 19.6%, 17.0% and 6.0%.

Keywords: Pipe-embedded envelopes, Residential building, Ground source heat exchanger, Climate change, Energy performance, Low carbon emission