The use of an attached sunspace is one of the most popular passive solar heating techniques. One of the main drawbacks of the sunspace is getting over heated by the sun energy during the hot season of the year. Even in northern climates overheating could be problematic and there is a considerable cooling demand. Shading is one of the most efficient and cost effective strategies to avoid overheating due to the high irradiation especially in the summer. Another strategy is using ventilation system to remove the excess heat inside the sunspace. However this rejected energy can be captured and stored for future energy demands of the sunspace itself or nearby buildings. Therefore the Solar blind system has been considered here for the shielding purpose in order to reduce the cooling demand. By considering the PV/T panels as the solar blind, the blocked solar energy will be collected and stored for covering part of the heating demand and the domestic hot water supplies of the adjacent building.  From a modeling point of view, the sunspace can be considered as a small-scale closed greenhouse. In the closed greenhouse concept, available excess heat is indeed utilized in order to supply the heating demand of the greenhouse itself as well as neighboring buildings. The energy captured by PV/T collectors and the excess heat from the sunspace then will be stored in a thermal energy storage system to cover the daily and seasonal energy demand of the attached building. In the present study, a residential building with an attached sunspace with height, length and width of 3, 12 and 3.5 meters respectively has been assumed located in two different locations, Stockholm and Rome. Simulations have been run for the Solar blind system integrated with a short-term and a long-term TES systems during a year to investigate the influence of the sunspace equipped with a PV/T Solar blind on the thermal behavior of the adjacent building. The simulated results show that the Solar blind system can be an appropriate and effective solution for avoiding overheating problems in sunspace and simultaneously produce and store significant amount of thermal energy and electricity power which leads to saving considerable amount of money during a year.

The aim of this study was to investigate the passive and active parameters affecting energy efficiency of two office buildings with sun spaces, namely the MATPUM Building and the Solar Building on the Middle East Technical University (METU) Campus, Ankara and the effect of sun spaces on temperature patterns within mentioned buildings. Both buildings were oriented in the same direction, namely south. However, the location and the type of the sunspaces differed from each other. The sun space in the MATPUM Building is an atrium which has southerly glazed fa&ccedil / ade. On the other hand, the sun space in the Solar Building is an enclosed conservatory which has southerly glazed fa&ccedil / ades and roof. The effect of sun spaces on temperature patterns within case study buildings was determined by collecting internal temperature and humidity data from different locations within the buildings and external temperature and humidity data on certain days of the week from May to August and October and November. Data loggers were used to collect these data. The collected data was then compared for the two buildings and also for the different months. In conclusion, more heat gain resulting in temperature increase inside the buildings was obtained in conservatories when compared to the atria which have glazed fa&ccedil / ade instead of glazed roof. This was also proved by the analysis of variance method which was used for the comparison of temperature data of two buildings

This study addresses the use of a Solar blind system (SBS) instead of ordinary glass used on windows of buildings. To investigate the effects of using an SBS for electricity energy generation a fictitious wooden house as a prototype, a real building needed to be constructed. The purpose of experimental studies is to measure the effect and asses the performance by examining the optimal angle of inclination and evaluating the profitability of SBS. To calculate the electricity energy generation by it is then expected that general renovations of a building will be used in the system. To perform the different scenario for each inclination angle, the simulation software PVsyst was used where the measurements are validated according to the simulation results to confirm that models are suitable and which inclination angles produced the most electricity. After the validation process, a financial assessment, and an annual electricity production of the system for a fictitious building where SBS is applied were performed. The result for the annual electricity production at different angles of inclination turned out to be 2457 kWh/year at 30, 2235 kWh/year at 60   and 1781 kWh/year at 90 . The optimal angle of inclination was 30  , which also has the highest electricity production compared to the other angles. Electricity production does not differ much with the inclination angle of 60. The simulation for the annual electricity production was examined for ten windows in opposite directions. The investment cost for the use of SBS was extraordinarily high, landing at 28,120 SEK/kW. The reason for this high investment cost is that it includes high material costs and that the area for SBS systems is low, which is 1,696 m². The reason is that the low area in m² leads to a lower electricity generation and the higher the area m² leads to higher electricity generation, which turns into affecting the profitability and electricity production.