Enabling Buildings as Power Stations: Multiscale Modelling and Numerical Simulations of Thermal Energy Storage in Concrete

The major challenge, in the context of energy efficiency and carbon minimisation, is to functionalize construction materials and to use the large surface area of concrete slabs buildings as thermal energy storage (TES) and free cooling. At present, concrete is considered to be a `dumb’ material, which has a particular set of thermal characteristics. However, contemporary concrete can and is produced with an almost infinite number of combinations of constituent materials. The capability to manipulate concrete materials to maximise TES is both the key to the problem but equally a complex problem, given relevant length scales are between mm and um and, due to temporal changes, we have a fourT dimensional problem. Hence mathematical modelling and numerical simulations are essential to select optimal materials and construction geometries to enable TES properties.

The main aim of the project is to develop multiscale modelling and numerical simulations framework for heat transport and thermal energy storage in concrete materials and identify the optimal strategies to improve heat storage capacity of concrete slabs.

Modifications of hierarchical microstructure of concrete and inclusions of directionallyT orientated metallic fibres will be considered as possible pathways to improve the TES properties of concrete. Simulations of mathematical models will be undertaken to identify optimal TES properties and to determine mechanical performance of designed new concrete materials. These will be then constructed, tested and verified experimentally. The simulation of heat transport processes in concrete materials with complex microstructures can be very challenging computationally due to disparity of scales and the need to resolve the fineTscale features. Novel multiscale finite element methods will be applied/developed for this multiscale problem, where multiscale basis functions will be computed in advance in a soTcalled snapshot space.

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