Personal thermal management using portable thermoelectrics for potential building energy saving
Dongliang Zhao,
Xing Lu,
Tianzhu Fan,
Yuen Shing Wu,
Lun Lou,
Qiuwang Wang,
Jintu Fan and
Ronggui Yang
Applied Energy, 2018, vol. 218, issue C, 282-291
Abstract:
Heating and cooling of buildings consume approximately 15% of all energy used in the United States. Such a large energy demand is primarily due to heating and cooling of the entire building space to temperature setpoints usually between 21.1 °C (70 °F) and 23.9 °C (75 °F). However, even with such a narrow range of temperature setpoints, more than 20% of the occupants do not feel thermally comfortable due to individual differences (e.g. age, gender, clothing, or physiology). The personal thermal management techniques, which create a local thermal envelope around a human body instead of heating or cooling the entire building space, have the potential to greatly reduce the building energy consumption and to enhance thermal comfort of individuals. In this study, a portable thermoelectric energy conversion unit (TECU) that converts electricity into cooling and heating energy is developed. The TECU supplies cool air (in the cooling mode) or warm air (in the heating mode) to regulate the thermal comfort of a human body. The cool or warm air is supplied through a tree-like rubber tube network that is knitted into a thermoregulatory undergarment. To achieve a cooling/heating target that provides satisfactory thermal comfort, the required cooling/heating power supply from the TECU is determined first while a theoretical model is then developed to guide the design of the TECU. To minimize the TECU weight and make it suitable for portable applications, relationships between weight and thermal resistances of commercial off-the-shelf heat sinks are established first, and a method to find the minimal weight of heat sinks for the TECU is then developed. This methodology is also applicable for other applications where heat sink weight needs to be minimized. The thermal manikin tests demonstrate that 24.6 W of personal cooling power and 18.5 W of personal heating power are achieved by using the TECU.
Keywords: Personal thermal management; Building energy saving; Thermoelectrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918302927
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:218:y:2018:i:c:p:282-291
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic
DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.02.158
Access Statistics for this article
Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan
More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).