| Popis: |
The paper analyses the heat balance of various types of earth-sheltered buildings, which may become a novel approach to sustainable dwellings. Earth-sheltered buildings may be simply described as a concrete construction built on a soil surface level and next covered with soil. Due to large mass and thermal capacity of soil it reacts more slowely to changes of its surface temperature and the annual variations are reduced with depth. It causes the soil temperature at a certain depth to be higher than that of surrounding air in the winter and lower in the summer. If this fact is taken into account when designing a house, one may achieve lower heat losses through a building’s envelope to the surrounding, by covering the building with soil. In the article, results of heat balance simulations for several types of earth sheltered houses with different soil thickness covering a roof are presented and compared with the heat balance of a traditional above-ground building. Annual heat balance is done in EnergyPlus software which is combined with simulations of soil temperature distribution in FlexPDE. The results indicate earth-sheltered buildings as better than the above-ground ones regarding the energy efficiency. Nowadays, when energy demands become more strict every year, this approach may become one of the ways of lowering the energy consumption in dwellings. |
