Impact of heat source at radiant electric heating panel

Abstract Among panel heating systems (PHS), floor heating (FH) is mostly used in Serbia because it offers special benefits in terms of thermal comfort and final energy consumption. Uniform temperature distribution in the hanging room, low temperature mode, fairly simple way of installation and maintenance, long service life, simple ambient temperature control and currently low price of electricity in Serbia, is the reason for the increasing use of electric heating cables (EHC) in PHS. In addition to a number of advantages, when using floor heating panels (FHP), it must be taken into account that the maximum temperature of the available free floor surface does not exceed the recommended limits because it has a negative impact on thermal comfort in the room and negatively affects the health of users. In this paper, the subject of experimental and numerical research is a low-temperature electric floor heating panel (LTEFHP) in specific conditions. In the experimental part of the paper, a two-storey test house (TH) was used, with dimensions of one floor, ie. thermal zones 1 000 × 800 × 650 mm, within which a pre-prepared physically prepared electric heating panel (EHP) is implemented as an active heating system. In order to test the test houses and the mentioned heating system under stationary conditions, a test chamber (TC) with dimensions 1 500 × 1 500 × 1 800 mm was used, in which the following three scenarios were simulated (when the mean air temperature inside the test chamber: tTC = -5°C, tTC = 0 °C and tTC = 4.5 °C). The same experimental installation (for the same simulation scenarios) was tested numerically in the second part of the paper, first in the EnergyPlus software, and then in the Ansys Workbench software. The main goal of this paper is to use different methods and tools to show the appropriate temperature fields in the characteristic layers of the examined geometric structure.