Airtightness in the Retrofit of Historic Buildings: Investigation of a retrofit strategy for historic traditional buildings, optimizing their energy-efficiency, indoor environment quality, and heritage preservation

Despite being a critical aspect in improving the building stock’s environmental performance and achieving the global environmental goals, the retrofit of traditional historic buildings is hindered by a lack of comprehensive guidelines tailored to their complex building physics and heritage preservation requirements. The conventional retrofit...

Design & Validation of a 3D-printed Heat Exchanger Manifold

Metal additive manufacturing has enabled great diversity and design freedom in heat exchanger design. However, these benefits cannot be adequately realised without optimizing its ancillary components as well, specifically the inlet and outlet manifolds. Optimizing the manifolds can significantly improve the flow distribution inside the heat...

Small Scale Pumped Thermal Energy Storage Modeling and Optimization

Variable green energy sources were sought to supply the growing demand for energy without impacting the environment. Wind and solar energy are at the forefront of the energy transition. However, their intermittent nature poses a challenge that necessitates the development of energy storage technologies. <br/>Several technologies were studied...

Optimizing district heating networks: Exploring the solution space: Transporting geothermal energy to consumers in Delft

Society is facing a huge challenge in switching the energy sectors dependence on fossil fuels into an energy sector using mostly renewable energy sources. The switch towards using more sustainable energy sources is known as the energy transition. The goal of the energy transition is to lower the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions emitted by the...

Optimizing supply temperatures in district heating grids

District heating systems (DHSs) have the potential to play a big part in the energy transition. The efficient operation of DHSs is therefore also an important subject of study. The operation of DHSs where combined heat and power (CHP) plants are used are particularly interesting, because CHPs can operate with high efficiency.<br/><br/>In this...

GridPenguin: A District Heating Network Simulator

District heating system (DHS) optimization is becoming an increasingly important problem because of the unused potential in flexibility that could allow less energy being wasted and the integration of renewable energy. While new optimization methods are proposed every year to tackle this problem, the literature lacks a good way to benchmark...

On the conjugate heat transfer method: Numerical study and an application case of optimization for a gas turbine transition piece cooling

Gas turbines (GT) play a crucial role in the transition to fully sustainable energy. Conversely, the expected growth of the GT market is met with more stringent regulatory requirements. Clearly, an increasing turbine inlet temperature (TIT) is beneficial for the efficiency of GT cycles. With increasing TIT, however, the magnitude of the thermal...

Techno-economic assessment of grid connected Power to Heat and Power to Hydrogen technologies: An electricity market scenario approach

Wind energy is the most promising renewable energy source for the Netherlands in the energy transition period. However, the investment costs of the offshore wind are huge. Until now, the government was supporting the investments in wind farms with subsidy schemes irrespective of the electricity market dynamics. The latest large-scale offshore...

On the turbulence modeling and conjugate heat transfer study of the cooling system of the Beam Dump Facility target at CERN: Steady and Transient analysis

The Beam Dump Facility (BDF) is a new fixed target facility proposed to be installed in the North Area of CERN. Currently in its design phase, the BDF is aimed at the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiment, which purpose is to investigate the origin of dark matter and other lightly interacting particles. The BDF target/dump sits at the...

A university building test case for occupancy-based building automation

Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) units in buildings form a system-of-subsystems entity that must be accurately integrated and controlled by the building automation system to ensure the occupants' comfort with reduced energy consumption. As control of HVACs involves a standardized hierarchy of high-level set-point control and...

Thermoeconomic Optimization of Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) for Low Grade Heat Recovery at Temperatures below 100℃

Low-grade heat sources are abundant on earth but are majorly untapped due to lower thermodynamic efficiency at low temperatures and cost considerations. A cost-effective technology is needed to convert this energy resource into useful forms of energy. This work aims at optimizing Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) based heat engine and a cogeneration...

Absorption heat pump cycles with NH₃ – ionic liquid working pairs

Ionic liquids (ILs), as novel absorbents, draw considerable attention for their potential roles in replacing water or LiBr aqueous solutions in conventional NH₃/H₂O or H₂O/LiBr absorption refrigeration or heat pump cycles. In this paper, performances of 9 currently investigated NH₃/ILs pairs are...

Convective Concrete: Additive Manufacturing to facilitate activation of thermal mass

This paper reports on the research-driven design process of an innovative thermal mass concept: Convective Concrete. The goal is to improve building energy efficiency and comfort levels by addressing some of the shortcomings of conventional building slabs with high thermal storage capacity. Such heavyweight constructions tend to have a slow...