Evaluation of the Thermal Resilience of Residential Buildings with PCM Enhanced Envelope Under Different Climate Zone

Abstract

These are the slides from a presentation given at 2025 ASHRAE winter meeting on 02/10/2025.The increasing frequency of heat wave events has significantly impacted residential buildings and the health of their occupants. Utilizing thermal storage to mitigate overheating presents a promising solution. To investigate this, we comprehensively assess the energy and thermal resilience performance of residential buildings with phase change material (PCM)-enhanced building envelopes in normal weather conditions and during heat wave events across different climate zones. The results show that integrating PCM-enhanced building envelopes can achieve 2.1-36.5% of energy saving for different climate zones. It can also significantly improve the thermal resilience in terms of the KPIs of indoor overheating degree (IOD), ambient warmness degree (AWD) and overheating escalation factor (OEF) during heat wave events with or without power outages for most of the climate zones. Further enhancement of thermal resilience during heat wave events with power outages has been achieved by combining natural ventilation at night with the PCM-enhanced building envelopes