Energy consumption analysis of an elevated traditional Chinese kang

Abstract

Heating of rural houses now constitutes 25% of total building energy consumption in China. Hence, the transition and new technologies for rural home heating is considered as the top priority for managing future building energy consumption in China. Chinese kang, the most traditional and widely used heating and sleeping bed system, has been regarded as a potentially sustainable and energy-saving solution. In this paper, we integrated a macroscopic heat transfer and airflow model of an elevated kang system into the existing Chinese building environmental system simulation and analysis software-DeST. The new integrated software can serve as a design and energy analysis tool for rural houses with the elevated kang heating. The basic methodologies and mathematical model for the elevated kang are presented and some preliminary results obtained from simulations of a typical house in northern China are also discussed.