Capitalizing on Solar Energy in Romania and Improving the Thermal Comfort of Buildings with Solar Air Collectors

Abstract

To argue the need to extend the use of solar collectors on large-scale and integrate them into residential, industrial or industrial buildings, we start from the analysis of the solar energy for the eastern area of Europe, particularly Romania. The work analyses the global solar irradiation by average monthly values and the sunshine duration, based on the statistical data from the last 21 years, specific to Romania, in several cities and in Bucharest. These parameters are compared for Bucharest with data from other eight European cities, using the archive data of the World Radiation Data Centre, for the period 1995–2016, for January, April, July and October months. This chapter also presents values of experimental measurement of solar irradiation, with high accuracy, made in Bucharest, from each season, during 2017–2018. In this chapter, we also review in brief the types of solar thermal collectors that can be used to improve the thermal comfort of buildings. The authors present solar air collectors in various constructive solutions and technologies to store the solar energy. They analyse their performance with changing environmental factors such as wind and atmospheric instability, keeping these performances longer with advanced storage technology. The applications of these thermal solar collectors are multiple, both for heating and cooling of the space, installed both separately or in thermoelectric hybrid systems.