Computational analysis of thermal performance of a passive family house built of hollow clay bricks

Abstract

• Architectural, constructional, and material solution of a brick-built passive family house is presented. • Up-to-date hollow bricks with lightened brick body and sophisticated system of internal cavities are used. • Overall thermal performance of the building is analyzed in computer simulations. • The necessary thickness of thermal insulation layer is several times lower than in the previous brick-based passive houses. • This designed passive family house is particularly suitable for the Central European countries. The architectural, constructional, and material solution of a brick-built passive family house is presented, together with a computational analysis of the overall thermal performance. The obtained results show that the thickness of the thermal insulation layer can be reduced several times if the up-to-date hollow bricks with lightened brick body and sophisticated systems of internal cavities are used, instead of traditional bricks or the old-fashioned hollow bricks with only several large cavities. The designed brick-built passive house is thus almost equalized with the timber-based houses from a point of view of building envelope thickness. In addition, it preserves some very important advantages characteristic for common brick structures, such as the fast water vapor transport through the wall, good thermal accumulation properties and fire resistance, or a low risk of biological degradation. Therefore, an up-to-date hollow brick block can be considered a suitable construction material for the passive-house design. This solution is particularly suitable for the Central European countries where using ceramic brick, in general, in building structures is a well established tradition; it was the most frequently used building material for many centuries.