Discerning heat transfer in building materials

Balaji, NC and Mani, Monto and Reddy, Venkatarama BV (2014) Discerning heat transfer in building materials. In: 4th International Conference on Advances in Energy Research (ICAER), DEC 10-12, 2013, Mumbai, INDIA, pp. 654-668.

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Abstract

The function of a building is to ensure safety and thermal comfort for healthy living conditions. Buildings primarily comprise an envelope, which acts as an interface separating the external environment from the indoors environment. The building envelope is primarily responsible for regulating indoor thermal comfort in response to external climatic conditions. It usually comprises a configuration of building materials to thus far provide requisite structural performance. However, studies into building-envelope configurations to provide a particular thermal performance are limited. As the building envelope is exposed to the external environment there will be heat and moisture transfer to the indoor environment through it. The overall phenomenon of heat and moisture transfer depends on the microstructure and configuration within the building material. Further, thermal property of a material is generally dependent on its microstructure, which comprises a network of pores and particles arranged in a definite structure. Thermal behaviour of a building material thus depends on the thermal conductivities of the solid particles, pore micro-structure and its constituent fluid (air and/or moisture). The thermal response of a building envelope is determined by the thermal characteristics of the individual building materials and its configuration. Understanding the heat transfer influenced by the complex networks of pores and particles is a relatively new study in the area of building climatic-response. The current study reviews the heat-transfer mechanisms that determine the thermal performance of a building material attributed to its micro-structure. A theoretical basis for the same is being evolved and its relevance in regulating heat-transfer through building envelopes, walls in particular, is reviewed in this paper. (C) 2014 N.C. Balaji. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

Item Type:	Conference Proceedings
Series.:	Energy Procedia
Additional Information:	Copyright for this article belongs to the ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, SARA BURGERHARTSTRAAT 25, PO BOX 211, 1000 AE AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Centre for Sustainable Technologies (formerly ASTRA)
Date Deposited:	18 Jan 2015 06:48
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2015 06:48
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/50696

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