Energy Analysis and Thermoeconomic Assessment of the Closed Greenhouse: The Largest Commercial Solar Building

The closed greenhouse concept has been studied in this paper. The closed greenhouse can be considered as the largest commercial solar building. In principle, it is designed to maximize the utilization of solar energy through seasonal storage. In an ideal fully closed greenhouse, there is not any ventilation window. Therefore, the excess heat must be removed by other means. In order to utilize the excess heat at a later time, long and/or short term thermal storage technology (TES) should be integrated. A developed model has been evaluated due to different situations. The closed greenhouse is compared with conventional greenhouse using a case study respect to the energy analysis. A parameter has been defined in this paper in order to compare performance of the closed greenhouse concept in different conditions. This parameter has been called ESR. Finally a preliminary thermo-economical study has been assessed in order to investigate on feasibility of the closed greenhouse concept.