Evaluating the Use of Waste Materials in Building Envelopes for Energy Efficiency: A Theoretical and Empirical Study

Abstract

With the increasing interest in energy-efficient building design, building energy simulation programs are increasingly employed in the design process to help architects and engineers decide which design alternatives save energy more. This research is an empirical and analytical study using a ready-made software package to evaluate the energy efficiency performance of building envelopes using recycled waste material. These methods used available environmental alternatives material in the experiment. To verify the results, two practical cases are tested. Validation is examined by comparing experimentally measured data and computational simulation data during the same summer period time. Real cases with small-scale actual rooms that were used to generate data to validate numerical models. The focus of this study is to compare the experimental measured thermal behavior of traditional and waste materials in residential buildings with simulation results. This comparison allows determining the effect of using waste material in southern walls of a residential building at an indoor temperature during hot summer days, in which the measurements took place during June and July. Meanwhile, the results indicated that the indoor temperature of real models was higher than the temperature of simulation models with about 3°C to 6 °C at measuring time (six summer days). This increase is about o 5.4% to 11.8%. The findings also revealed that the use of waste material in the southern wall of a residential building could decrease the indoor temperature by about 0.2 - 3°C degree compared with the traditional material at the same wall. It means that waste materials in southern walls could decrease 0.9% to 4.1% of indoor temperature compared with traditional materials. This study found that the analytical and empirical small-scale models could contribute to determining the usage of waste material at southern walls of residential buildings. Also, the comparison of the results indicates that Design-Builder can predict indoor temperature to achieve thermal comfort with good accuracy and it can be used by researchers and designers to evaluate the thermal performance of buildings.