Improving Thermal Performance of Buildings using Smart Inspections and Peltier-driven Heat Recovery

Shariq, Muhammad Hasan

Abstract

Buildings account for 40% of overall carbon emissions in the UK which have significant impacts on the environment. The overconsumption of energy for heating and cooling is primarily caused by thermal leakages due to building defects. Existing techniques of building façade inspections are often manual, time-consuming and/or labour-intensive, while retrofit techniques like evaporative cooling windcatchers, PCMs, and Earth-to-air Heat Exchangers (EAHE) present massive installation and maintenance challenges.
This study first qualitatively investigates a smart building inspection framework using a novel instantaneous thermal-visible image fusion technique. The data capture results showed pixel-level accuracy invariant to parallax errors. The fused thermal-visible imagery was further evaluated using a self-supervised machine-learning model with pre-trained pseudo labels for defects. The results showed promising fault identification capabilities thanks to the collective visible-thermal information in each dataset.
The primary focus of this research is a detailed quantitative examination of the proposed Peltier-driven cooling mechanism designed for integration with a passive wind tower. This thermoelectric cooling (TEC) system uses heat pipes to rapidly absorb ambient heat through conduction, cooling the air as it passes through multiple layers of actively cooled pipes via convection. The cooling performance was examined and validated through CFD modelling and a full-scale prototype of the cooling unit.
Preliminary results showed a 3.66°C air temperature drop at a 50L/s airflow rate. Three augmentation techniques were proposed: a regulated damper before the cooler, an additional layer of cooling pipes, and an axial fan system to ensure necessary ventilation. In an adiabatic room model of 3m x 2.5m x 2.5m with the proposed TEC cooling through a wind tower, results showed up to 6°C of indoor cooling using the damper before the cooler and up to 8°C of cooling using all three optimisations in combination. This was achieved while maintaining a minimum ventilation rate of 47.9 L/s regardless of external wind speeds. This solar-compatible system promises a large-scale potential to reduce building HVAC loads.

Citation

Shariq, M. H. Improving Thermal Performance of Buildings using Smart Inspections and Peltier-driven Heat Recovery. (Thesis). University of Hull. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4860398

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 4, 2024
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4860398
• Additional Information: Faculty of Science and Engineering; University of Hull
• Award Date: Jul 24, 2024