The APACHE simulation engine has received several upgrades to simulate Armstrong® Templok ceiling® tiles.
Templok tiles contain phase change material (PCM) whose properties can be temperature dependent. APACHE now implements this temperature-dependence with a PCM model based on Templok tile data provided by Armstrong. This model allows the temperature look-up of the following properties:
·Specific heat capacity - based on a single temperature-dependent curve
·Thermal conductivity - linearly dependent on temperature between solid and liquid states
·PCM State - a non-linear quantity expressing the degree of transition between solid and liquid states
The APACHE finite difference scheme for solving the heat flow problem depends on the specific heat capacity and thermal conductivity of the materials. Since these can change with temperature for Templok tiles, this scheme has been upgraded to allow its coefficients to be recalculated each time-step.
To accurately capture the dynamic behaviour of the PCM material, the simulation time-step is automatically reduced for heat-flow calculations through ceilings contain Templok tiles.
With these engine upgrades in place a simulation is launched in the same manner as any simulation using the Apache simulation dialog. However, it should be noted that in order to output the new PCM surface level variables in VistaPro, the user will need to enable the following settings in the output options dialog:
Figure: Simulation output options to enable surface level PCM variables in VistaPro
