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General Introduction
Published in Neha Gupta, Gopal Nath Tiwari, Photovoltaic Thermal Passive House System, 2022
Romans invented a central heating system called hypocaust, which used in Roman bathhouses. Hot water from a stove was allowed to run through the ceramic pipes in the wall and under the floors. Romans also mastered construction and invented concrete, and immense structures like Pantheon were constructed in Rome. The Pantheon also demonstrated the climate aspect of daylight. The oculus in the roof allowed sunlight to illuminate the space sufficiently. Also, it was established that the higher the window, the more daylight is allowed.
History and Evolution
Published in David L. Hansen, Indoor Air Quality Issues, 2018
During the Roman Empire the hypocaust was refined to include hollow wall tiles; such systems were able to heat whole buildings without the problems associated with smoke and other by-products of combustion (Bedford 1964). With the fall of the Roman Empire, however, the hypocaust virtually disappeared.
A novel radiant floor system: Detailed characterization and comparison with traditional radiant systems
Published in International Journal of Green Energy, 2020
Saunak Shukla, Reza Daneshazarian, Aggrey Mwesigye, Wey H. Leong, Seth B. Dworkin
The Ancient Romans pioneered floor-heating systems; evident from ancient sites known as “hypocausts,” the floors were heated by directing exhaust gases from wood fires under raised floors (Woodson 2010). In the early twentieth century, when building envelopes were not as airtight as they are now, radiant floor systems were not adopted as much in cold climate countries such as Canada. To compensate for harsh cold climatic conditions, floors had to be heated to uncomfortably high temperatures and thus there was little to no effort made in navigating nuances of space heating systems. However, since the energy crisis of the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on implementing building code that fosters ‘energy-efficient’ building envelopes such as those pertaining to minimizing transmission and ventilation heat losses (Woodson 2010).
Indoor thermal behaviour of an office equipped with a ventilated slab: a numerical study
Published in Journal of Building Performance Simulation, 2021
Matthieu Labat, Ion Hazyuk, Matthieu Cezard, Sylvie Lorente
Thermally Activated Building System (TABS) are parts of building structures that are used to store energy and release it later. This denomination refers notably – but not exclusively – to concrete floors or ceilings with embedded water pipes, as exemplified in (Antonopoulos and Tzivanidis 1997; Koschenz and Dorer 1999; Zhang, Liu, and Jiang 2012). TABS have been attracting the interest of researchers in recent decades (Romaní, de Gracia, and Cabeza 2016). The reason is to be found in the great thermal comfort they can offer while saving energy, taking advantage of the use of radiative heat transfer (Rhee, Olesen, and Kim 2017) and high thermal inertia. While modern TABS often use water as the heat transfer fluid, mostly because it has high density and specific heat, the concept of storing heat in a building structure is quite ancient and initially used air as the medium to transport heat. It can be traced back thousands of years and has been found in multiple locations across the globe. The huoqiang, which consisted of baked earth, is believed to have matured and given birth to the Chinese kang (Bean, Olesen, and Kim 2010). Zhuang et al. (2009 explain that, during the 1990s, the Chinese government promoted the use of a more modern, more efficient kang, which is elevated and thus uses both faces for heat transfer. The Korean ondol is a system that is quite similar to the kang. It is now the prevalent heating system in Korean residential buildings. Ancient Roman public bathhouses comprised several baths of different temperatures, heated thanks to what we call a hypocaust. Thébert (2003) presents several archeological sites attesting to the presence of heated public baths that prefigured the modern hypocausts. In (Basaran and Ilken 1998), the energetic efficiency of such a system is debated. Later, in Europe, (Evelyn 1691) described a greenhouse heated by an outside furnace with pipes running underground along the whole length of the greenhouse floor. Liverpool Cathedral used an air-based radiant heating system (Haden 1924), where the air flowed in a closed loop.