Comparison of Hygrothermal Comfort and Life Cycle Between Recycled Plastic Block and Concrete Blocks in a Social Housing in The City of Cuenca

Abstract

The qualitative and quantitative housing deficit in the city of Cuenca Ecuador is high, to provide help to the homeless, the Ecuadorian government decreed “Casa Para Todos” project in 2018. This type of housing focuses on providing an accessible alternative for people with limited resources, however, the type of housing that is granted does not comply with the conditions and materials that guarantee the comfort of the users. Additionally, there is a large percentage of plastic garbage that is collected every day by the city's cleaning system, part of it is recycled and another part is deposited in sanitary landfills due to poor handling within the recycling chain and process. The main objective of this research is to determine the hygrothermal comfort and life cycle of a housing prototype with recycled and processed plastic material for the manufacture of modules that together form the walls of the proposed houses. To achieve the proposed objective, traditional concrete block systems are compared to recycled plastic (polyethylene and polypropylene) walls, using the K coefficient (thermal conductivity) in the Desing Builder software, obtaining simulations of hygrothermal comfort and relative humidity. As a complement to the research, the analysis of the life cycle and environmental impact was carried out with the SimaPro software. As result of the simulations, it was obtained that the relative humidity in the analyzed environments, parents' bedroom, and living room, has a value of between 40 and 60% in the two construction systems, being within the comfort ranges. The internal temperature in the concrete block system fluctuates between 15 to 20 ° C while with the recycled block it is in the ranges of 17 to 20 ° C, which allows evidence that the house made up of recycled blocks has higher thermal gain in prolonged periods during the day and that the concrete block house has great heat losses due to the porosity of the material, so the use of recycled plastic blocks is recommended; deepen research on the life cycle and its environmental impact, as the results indicate that the recycled plastic block has a greater environmental impact in its life cycle than the concrete block.