Ambition

The ambition of InDeWaG project is to bring to industrial ripeness a façade and interior wall system based on radiant heating and cooling glass surfaces made from water and/or air flow glazing, abbreviated as WFG and AFG, which harvests solar energy for various use at large scale. Such building elements will be made ready for commercial application in the building sector and will be designed to become easy adoptable for 21st century façade and overall building technology, especially for cost effective ZEB technology with increased daylight use, variable ventilation and individual control comfort. The benefits of fluid flow glazing façade technology were proven over the past 8 years on the level of few demonstrator projects, but there are still many difficulties for the right practical implementation.

The concept for extending the State of Art in water flow glass façade systems is oriented towards a system that will be able to satisfy the cooling requirements and the hot water needs for a whole building. This is achieved through the integration of a series of transparent, translucent or opaque solar thermal absorbers which operate at different nominal temperatures, namely 30ºC for heating and seasonal energy storage, 60ºC for sanitary hot water supply and 90ºC for cooling through absorption chillers. In this way, a complete glass curtain wall façade will be able to deliver all the levels of thermal energy required by a building while retaining its architectural aesthetics. In addition, implementation of radiant surfaces inside the building will be investigated by building simulation with IDA ICE and TRNSYS. The components will be tested in Demonstrators situated in two different climate zones - Bulgaria and Spain.

A proven design method, a tested and certified façade system unit, application possibilities and a focused market analysis are crucial for the fast market uptake of the Fluid Flow Glazing. The industrial development of this exciting façade technology is the main goal of InDeWaG consortium, enabling an important step forward towards achieving nZEB standard /stated by the 2020 EU policy in the Directive 31 from May 19th 2010/.

OBJECTIVES / VISION

The main objective of InDeWaG is to develop an industrial technology for fabrication of cost affordable general-purpose Fluid Flow Glazing façade elements, which give maximum daylight utilization and maximum interior comfort at energy consumption level of nZEB. In addition, also interior radiant elements will be developed. This technical development is accompanied by the development of an open access software tool for design of buildings with this new type of façade and interior radiant cooling and heating elements.

The cost reduction of at least 15% is achieved by following the LowExergy9 principle and adjustment of the temperature difference between the exterior environment and the interior to a minimum value which is relevant for significant reduction of HVAC energy demand and lighting energy consumption.

About InDeWaG

Scope of the Project

InDeWaG is acronym of the project "Industrial Development of Water Flow Glazing Systems" - Innovation action project funded under Horizon 2020, a Public Private Partnership on "BUILDINGS DESIGN FOR NEW HIGHLY ENERGY PERFORMING BUILDINGS". Nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB) performance levels will become a "must" for new buildings in Europe by the end of 2020 in compliance with the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). InDeWaG's objectives concentrate on the development of an exemplary building design, which has a huge potential to minimize energy requirements and meet nZEB performance levels in a multitude of building types and for different climatic zones and local building sites.

InDeWaG establishes new technical knowledge and explores the concept of improved technology.The glazing units developed within the InDeWaG project use circulating water in the chamber between the glass planes to capture solar radiation and transport the generated heat through a pipe system to be used for different purposes such as heating, preheating, domestic hot water and others. Via a circulation of heated or cooled water within the glass chamber in the window the whole facade may act as either a heating or cooling device. Demonstration activity shows technical feasibility in a near to operational environment. Implementing passive and active strategies minimize the use of active HVAC systems, taking advantage of the available natural resources such as solar radiation, thermal variability and daylight.

In the recent year there is a trend in the architecture for designing transparent building envelopes. In most of the modern heavily glazed office buildings in Western Europe the cooling demand is higher than heating demand. Therefore it is necessary to reduce cooling demands by implementing new strategies unique to the fully glazed buildings. Modern facades are using double-glazing with low-e coating to reduce energy emittance in summer and in winter. Comfort has an increasing value for current offices. Independently from climate the room conditions have to be constant overall seasons. Desktop workspaces need glare protection but high illumination with min. 500 lux. The illumination and pc's produced heat loads add up to the solar gains. Instead of blocking the solar radiation InDeWaG project aims at using water to absorb its heat while allowing the light to pass through the glazing. Additionally InDeWaG joins the range of solutions for room conditioning by using water instead of air. Water has a 3.5 thousand times higher heath capacity than air and can easily be transported through smaller pipes instead of big ventilation shafts. For interior use as partition walls InDeWaG can offer transparent solution for space separation and for heating and cooling.

Being an active European project under Horizon 2020, InDeWaG can also be found at the CORDIS platform of the European Commission: