ENERGY BALANCE AND SECOND LAW ANALYSIS APPLIED TO BUILDINGS

What is it about?

Building energy assessment is usually performed based on fundamentals of the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is mainly concerned on quantitative energy aspects. However, this approach does not provide a faithful thermodynamic evaluation of the overall energy conversion processes that occur in buildings, and a more robust approach should be followed. This paper presents an exploratory work to study the relevance of Second Law analysis: in addition to the calculation of energy balances, the concept of exergy is used to evaluate the quality of energy sources, resulting in a higher flexibility of strategies to optimize a building design. In this context, a digression on the potentiality of constructal theory, that can be considered a law of thermodynamics, has been outlined.

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