Solar Decathlon solar house competition heats up

Competition is underway in the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Solar Decathlon, in which 20 teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house. The house designs entered in the competition not only capture heat and light from the sun, but also integrate design features to take advantage of cooling breezes and shading. By combining these proven energy efficient designs with the latest off-the-shelf technology, the teams aim to create homes that reduce utility bills and meet all their energy needs, while providing all the comforts of home.

Water wall

Among the innovative designs on show is the University of Arizona’s (UA) Project Sage house, featuring a water-filled Trombe wall that forms a solar thermal collector. The principle of the wall is that a piece of glazing is put over something with high density, so that when sunlight comes through the glass and the radiant heat is absorbed by the mass, it warms the air between the glass and the wall. At nighttime, when the temperature drops, the heat can’t get back out through the glass and the warm air rises in the cavity and can be directed into the house through louvers in winter, or vented outside in summer.

The walls are made from vacuum-sealed panels constructed from the same material as recyclable plastic water bottles. It contains football-shaped cavities that are filled with water. In total the system holds 215 gallons of water (just over 2,000 pounds) and every cubic foot of water can hold 64 Btu’s for every degree Fahrenheit of temperature change. This makes the system three times more efficient than concrete and it’s also much lighter to ship because the water can be added at its destination. Plus, the team says living next to a water wall provide, “some really neat optical effects and lighting effects.”

The wall is the brainchild of Eddie Hall, who cautions that, like many things in the experimental house, it is a prototype, but it has been refined after a year and a half of experimentation.

Read more . . .

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Tags: comforts of home, heat and light, innovative designs, lighting effects, proven energy, radiant heat, solar decathlon, solar thermal collector, temperature change, water wall

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Project Energy, environment, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.