TU Delft's Bucky Lab: The glazed frost window

05/05/2020 | Print view

A hospital is just one place of many where the smart management of heat is critical. And what better than a system that achieves that more or less passively? - © TU Delft / Bucky Lab — © TU Delft / Bucky Lab

A hospital is just one place of many where the smart management of heat is critical. And what better than a system that achieves that more or less passively?

This prototype window panel that allows better heat and cooling management was designed by TU Delft master's degree facade students Grammatiki Dasopoulou, Maria-Iro Stefanaki and Tessa Rouwenhorst as part of the Bucky Lab – to be integrated into the facade of the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam.

The aim of the prototype is to reduce the energy consumption of the hospital by applying a Phase Change Material (PCM) to achieve a passive cooling and heating system. During the summer days the solar radiation will be reflected by a prismatic glass that is placed in front of the PCM container, in order to make sure that the PCM can absorb all the heat from the overheating rooms. During the night, specially designed ventilation lids which will open and permit the fresh outdoor air to cool and re-solidify the PCM. On winter days when the sun is lower in the sky, the sunshine heats up the PCM and then later give off the heat into the room.

The functioning principle of the window prototype and of the PCM in detail.

The PCM is a material that is capable of absorbing and liberating great amounts of energy upon melting and solidifying. For this project the students built a 1:1 prototype with adjusted dimensions where they have used two PCMs with different melting points and also water to illustrate the 3 different phases of solid, semi-liquid and liquid.