Radiant floor enhanced with two PCMs for space heating and cooling: A large-scale experimental investigation

When integrated in radiant floor systems, PCMs provide efficient energy storage and release in the heating period as well as effective buffering of internal gains in the cooling season. Despite a large number of studies has been examining the thermal performance of radiant floors with PCMs, most of the works conducted a numerical analysis. Only a few studies experimentally investigated PCM integrated radiant floor systems, and they were limited at laboratory scale. In addition, nearly all the works focused exclusively on space heating. A radiant floor heating and cooling system enhanced with PCMs was experimentally analysed at large-scale by the University of Ferrara within the H2020 European project IDEAS. The system was composed of two types of PCMs, one for heating and one for cooling, installed in a 100 m2 building demonstrator. Analysis of the monitoring data showed that the system can maintain the heating and cooling setpoint temperatures even in hard weather conditions and that the turning on of the system can be effectively postponed thanks to the PCM effect.