Experimental investigation on the heating performance of a novel designed trombe wall

A Trombe wall (T-Wall) is widely applied to buildings due to the advantage of saving fossil energy and improving indoor environment, etc. However, a traditional T-Wall usually has the drawbacks of low thermal efficiency and thermal inertia, which lead to poor heating performance and significant energy loss at night. To overcome the above drawbacks, in this paper, an improved T-Wall was designed and its heating performances were experimentally investigated. Firstly, a detailed description on the improved T-Wall, test-bench and measurement system were reported. Then, the experimental procedures, conditions and data reduction were given. Finally, the experimental results were analyzed and discussed. The results revealed that the air temperature in the test room was higher than 16.0 °C during more than half of the testing time, and the minimum air velocity was 0.35 m/s at the vent outlet, which could circulate the indoor air to improve the thermal environment. Furthermore, the daily thermal efficiency of the improved T-Wall was higher than 50% during the daytime. Therefore, the results of this study provided valuable insights for improving the heating performance of T-Wall.