# Nonwoven Textile Waste Added with PCM for Building Applications
## 4 Case Study  
The tested materials were applied to a mobile operating unit in meeting office and/or secretarial configuration, made in the form of multifunctional shelter, potentially installed on a road trailer. The shelter had a parallelepiped geometry of 6 \(\times\) 2.5 \(\times\) 2.4 m. The envelope was assumed to be made up of expandable sandwich panels, consisting of two aluminum sheets of 10/10 thickness each, and an insulator among them. On one side there were two glazed windows, one square meter each, with a movable sun screen. Figure 15 shows the render produced by the software DesignBuilder [40]. Four kinds of insulation were compared: polyurethane foam, wool board, wool with 26% in weight of PCM and wool with 41% in weight of PCM. The performance comparison was carried out while keeping constant the thermal transmittance of the opaque wall (\(U\) = 0.626 W\(\cdot\)m\({}^{-2}\cdot\)K\({}^{-1}\)), and therefore with variable insulation thicknesses due to the different thermal conductivity of the considered insulators (Table 4). The reference \(U\)-value was taken from Apulian regional standard procurement specifications for this kind of shelter [41]. Figure 14: Heat flux imbalance vs the mean temperature of the specimen. Figure 15: DesignBuilder render of the shelter. Windows model consisted of a double-glazed unit with air cavity (6/6/6 mm). Internal screens had high reflectivity slats operated by solar control with 120 W\(\cdot\)m\({}^{-2}\) set point. Their thermal transmittance was 3.094 W\(\cdot\)m\({}^{-2}\cdot\)K\({}^{-1}\). The door on the short side had the identical structure of the opaque wall. The shelter was supposed to be occupied by two adults from 8 to 19 from Monday to Friday. During the occupation period, there was 200 W heat input for lighting and electrical appliances, and a natural ventilation of 10 l/s per person. The air conditioning system was defined through a \"Simple HVAC\", so that Design-Builder could automatically calculate heating and cooling capacity in the zone. The HVAC sizing option was set to \"Adequate\", that means that the heating and cooling equipment had unlimited capacity to meet demands, always maintaining set point temperatures. In order to highlight the local climate influence on structure thermal behavior depending on the insulating material used for the opaque envelope, the energy performances were simulated in three locations with three different climates. Some characteristic climatic parameters of these locations (Palermo, Bari, and Bolzano) are shown in Tables 5 and 6. The simulations were carried out with internal set point temperature of 20 \({}^{\circ}\)C in the heating period and 25 \({}^{\circ}\)C in the cooling period, and only during the occupation hours. Figure 16 shows the annual energy requirement for air conditioning system (heating and cooling) for those locations. Figure 17 shows the percentage change of annual energy requirement for air conditioning system of the studied wool-based materials compared to polyurethane foam (reference). The higher thermal inertia of the wool-PCM materials produces an increase in consumption for heating and a reduction in consumption for cooling. This leads to a substantial annual \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline  & **Palermo** & **Bari** & **Bolzano** \\ \hline Climatic Zone (D.P.R. 412/93) & B & C & E \\ Heating period & 01/12–31/03 & 15/11–31/03 & 15/10–15/04 \\ Heating Degrees Day (\({}^{\circ}\)C-d/yr) & 751 & 1185 & 2791 \\ Design external temperature (\({}^{\circ}\)C) & 5 & 0 & \(-\)15 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 6: Site climatic properties (Italian regulations). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline  & **Thermal Conductivity** & **Thicknesscm** \\
**Insulation** & **W\(\cdot\)m\({}^{-1}\cdot\)K\({}^{-1}\)** & **cm** \\ \hline Polyurethane foam (30 kg\(\cdot\)m\({}^{-3}\)) & 0.028 & 4.0 \\ PCM\_00 & 0.049 & 7.0 \\ PCM\_26 & 0.061 & 8.6 \\ PCM\_41 & 0.080 & 11.4 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 4: Properties of the insulation (at 24 \({}^{\circ}\)C).