Positioning of an isothermal heat storage layer in a building wall exposed to the external environment

The paper presents an idea for the enhancement of a building's thermal insulation component by adding into the structure a thin layer of a phase-change material (PCM). The proposed solution can be dedicated, for example, to an external partition of lightweight construction. The capacity for latent heat storage allowed it to stabilize the temperature inside the insulation layer in a daily cycle and to minimize the temperature difference between the internal and external surfaces. In this paper, different positions of a PCM layer in the thermal insulation of an external wall were analysed. The main goal of this work was to find the best position of the PCM layer, taking into account the indoor temperature and the meteorological conditions. The authors propose two parameters: the amount of stored energy and the dynamism of the charging/discharging processes. Taking into account large temperature fluctuations on the external surface during summer and winter, it was concluded that, for this specific case, the most appropriate solution would be an external position of the PCM with a melting temperature of 20°C.