Building structures with high thermal inertia based on phase change materials

In order to ensure the comfort of people who inhabit a building, the building envelope must have thermal inertia great enough to dampen its temperature fluctuations, in particular those due to the solar cycle. The use of materials that can accumulate large amounts of heat in the form of phase change latent heat, the so-called PCM, represents a very interesting approach to make buildings reactive to cyclical thermal loads and achieve better thermal performance with the same wall thickness, or the same thermal performance with reduced wall thickness.The present work is focused onto the development of roofs with small surface mass and high thermal inertia thanks to the integration of PCM. In particular, the relationship between properties of the PCM and thermal behaviour of the roof structure is investigated by numerical simulation. Moreover, the more convenient position of the PCM layer with respect to the thermal insulation layer is investigated for some typical structures to be protected against summer overheating.