This work aims to characterize phase change materials (PCM) for thermal energy storage in buildings (thermal comfort). Fatty acids, biobased organic PCM, are attractive candidates for integration into active or passive storage systems for targeted application. Three pure fatty acids (capric, myristic and palmitic acids) and two eutectic mixtures (capric-myristic and capric-palmitic acids) are studied in this paper. Although the main storage properties of pure fatty acids have already been investigated and reported in the literature, the information available on the eutectic mixtures is very limited (only melting temperature and enthalpy). This paper presents a complete experimental characterization of these pure and mixed fatty acids, including measurements of their main thermophysical properties (melting temperature and enthalpy, specific heats and densities in solid and liquid states, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity as well as viscosity) and the properties of interest regarding the system integrating the PCM (energy density, volume expansion). The storage performances of the studied mixtures are also compared to those of most commonly used PCM (salt hydrates and paraffins).

The amount of time people spend inside buildings is significant. Indoor environment quality deficiencies in some of these buildings may affect the health of its users. Therefore, a systematic literature review has been conducted to assess the quality of indoor environments in existing buildings in Latin America. The objectives of this review are (1) identifying countries and building types whose indoor environment quality has been analyzed the most, (2) identifying most used evaluation strategies, (3) identifying comfort types and most evaluated variables, and (4) determining whether or not Latin American buildings are comfortable and what local factors contribute to that effect. From the 100 selected papers for this analysis, it was noted that Brazil and Argentina led the studies on residences and schools. It was also noted that hygrothermal comfort was the most analyzed comfort type, with temperature and humidity leading the number of studies. Finally, this review shows a lack of studies including buildings whose users are sensitive to indoor environmental quality, such as nurseries, senior homes, or health facilities. Additionally, there is a sustained discrepancy between objective measuring methods and user perception. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of 88 buildings shows that in Latin America, 67.5% of buildings are uncomfortable; thus, it is necessary to improve the designs and regulatory standards, to educate users, and to improve building monitoring management at the operational stage.

The constant increase in the requirement for electric energy on the part of the service sector has driven the development of tools for the analysis of energy data regarding the management of buildings. Particularly university campuses are made up of buildings for different purposes and uses. Therefore, this work proposes to develop a method capable of providing clear and easy-to-understand information to track electricity end-use by means of two-dimensional graphs. The aim of the method is to analyse the data of the electricity consumption of one or several buildings and compare them with regard to their surface areas and uses, as well as to obtain a correlation with the outdoor temperature. The visual analysis of the building electricity consumption in the campus 'Sciences et Technologies' of the University of Bordeaux in France is based on graphs which include electricity use intensity, time series of daily electricity consumption, scatter diagrams of consumption versus heating degree-days, and boxplots for daily consumption profiles. This analysis permits characterising the electricity consumption of the different types of buildings and determining a trends of energy end-use in the short as well as in the long term.