A Comprehensive Evaluation on Energy, Economic and Environmental Performance of the Trombe Wall during the Heating Season

Trombe wall is a passive building energy saving technology that uses solar energy to reduce buildings’ heating load and adjust indoor thermal environment. In recent years, much research has been done to increase the thermal efficiency of Trombe wall, but little is focused on the evaluation of Trombe wall from energy, economic and environmental aspects comprehensively. Based on the thermal performance calculation method in ISO 52016-2:2017(E), the authors proposed a concise method to evaluate the energy, economic and environmental performance of ventilated and non-ventilated Trombe walls during a heating season. Firstly, non-iteration calculation methods were introduced for the energy evaluation of Trombe wall and conventional wall during the heating season. Then the economic and environmental evaluation models were brought out according to the energy performance of Trombe wall. After that, a residential building was presented as the case building to evaluate Trombe walls’ performance in five building climate zones of China. The calculation results showed that both heating degree days and solar radiation had significant impact on the energy saving effect of Trombe walls. In comparison with non-ventilated Trombe walls, ventilated ones displayed more obvious energy saving potential in all five climate regions, which can provide averagely 62% more heating for the room in the case study. Though the heating degree days of Guangzhou (hot-summer and warm-winter zone) was the smallest in the five zones, ventilated Trombe wall in the zone had the poorest economic performance due to the scarcest solar radiation during the heating season.