Radiant Floor Behavior in Removing Cooling Loads from Large Glassed Buildings

When radiant systems are installed in highly glazed rooms large amounts of solar radiation directly hit the cooled surface; this specific behavior of radiant systems in this situation should be studied in order to modify the procedure that is traditionally applied to design radiant cooling systems. Furthermore, radiant systems behave in different ways depending on their thermal mass. Based on previous researches, a model is proposed in this work to determine the conversion of heat gains into cooling loads; the model is specifically adapted to highly glazed buildings, and is differentiated for low and high thermal masses radiant systems. A numerical model is developed to provide a calculation example that confirms the proposed procedure.