Influences of local materials on the building behavior and evaluation of the cooling loads

Abstract

The energy demand in buildings sector is always increasing due to the climate, the economic growth, and also the need for thermal comfort. The aim of this paper is to find a way that can significantly reduce the energy demand for a building through an improvement of the design of its thermal envelope. Within this work, we utilized the thermophysical properties of four building materials: three local materials (compressed earth block (BTC), lateritic block (BLT), and raw earth), and one modern (Hollow cement). The numerical optimization of the building design has been performed dynamically by Comsol 5.3a software: the case study is Ouagadougou and the surface is 100m2. Also, the temporal variations in the inside of the room, as well as the internal and external temperatures of the walls and the ceiling with four different materials, have been determined. The result of the simulation shows that, for BLT, the maximum of ambiante temperature is obtained 308K around 22h, for Adobe it is 308.8K around 21h, for BTC it was 309.2K at 19h30, and finally for cement block it is 310K around 17. We can safely say that BLT is the material leading to the lowest average daily indoor temperature variation, thus leading to the reduction of air conditioning load and the need for thermal comfort and around the order of 4KW of energy saving can be obtained.