Monitoring the thermal contribution of certain mortar additives as a way to optimize the energy performance of buildings

Abstract

Climate challenge requires developing approaches capable of improving the thermal capacities of building materials. These are the objectives of the new additive manufacturing industry in the building sector to mitigation of urban heat island. The objective of this work was to verify that the thermal properties of the additives are transferred to those of the final product, the mortar. For this purpose, several additives with different thermal conductivities, ranging from 0,038 to 130 W/m·K, were selected to include them in the matrix of a standard mortar with the same volume percentage. Once the mixtures were prepared, they were subjected to two thermal tests: a first thermal conductivity test, and a second heat transfer test. For the last test, a low-cost solar simulator was used to heat the mortar samples. Both the heating and cooling of the samples were monitored with a thermographic camera. After analysis, it was found that the mortar samples with additives modified their thermal behaviour by up to 30 % compared to the mortar sample without additives. These are encouraging results that open up new research possibilities that could materialize in studying the thermal behaviour of mortars with other kind of additives and with different dosage percentages.