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In passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it does not involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices.
A double envelope house is a passive solar house design which collects solar energy in a solarium and passively allows the warm air to circulate around the house between two sets of walls, a double building envelope. This design is from 1975 by Lee Porter Butler in the United States.
Solar energy is clean and renewable. Solar architecture is designing buildings to use the sun's heat and light to maximum advantage and minimum disadvantage, and especially refers to harnessing solar power. It is related to the fields of optics, thermics, electronics and materials science. Both active and passive strategies are involved.
A Trombe wall is a passive solar building design strategy that adopts the concept of indirect-gain, where sunlight first strikes a solar energy collection surface in contact with a thermal mass of air. The sunlight absorbed by the mass is converted to thermal energy (heat) and then transferred into the living space.
The solar chimney can be improved by integrating it with a trombe wall. The added advantage of this design is that the system may be reversed during the cold season, providing solar heating instead. A variation of the solar chimney concept is the solar attic. In a hot sunny climate the attic space is often blazingly hot in the summer.
Solar gain is illustrated by the snow on the roof of this house: sunlight has melted all of the snow, except for the area that is shaded by the chimney to the right. Solar gain (also known as solar heat gain or passive solar gain) is the increase in thermal energy of a space, object or structure as it absorbs incident solar radiation.
Passive cooling is a building design approach that focuses on heat gain control and heat dissipation in a building in order to improve the indoor thermal comfort with low or no energy consumption. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] This approach works either by preventing heat from entering the interior (heat gain prevention) or by removing heat from the building ...
Passive solar building design – windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, and distribute solar energy in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. Building-integrated photovoltaics – photovoltaic materials are used to replace conventional building materials in parts of the building envelope such as the ...