Investigating the effectiveness of the Building’s envelope materials in hot and arid climates to achieve indoor thermal comfort

Abstract

Envelope Building materials play an important role in architecture by providing protection necessities, comfort, and technical performance while promoting an architectural language and an image. The building envelope represents all the surfaces of a space, which consist of opaque parts such as walls, floors and roofs and transparent parts such as windows and openings. The building envelope is the partition between the external and internal environment of the building which influences the heat transfer between the two environments so it has a direct impact on the thermal comfort sensation which also influences the energy consumptions. This research focuses on the opaque building materials of the envelope and their contribution in the thermal comfort and the energy consumption; an investigation of the impact and the thermal behavior of different envelope configuration materials under the climatic conditions of Biskra was carried, Algeria a hot and arid climate. The thermal performance of different materials was compared using in situ measurement using “Testo 480” a hygrothermal scale and by analyzing the results of a different simulation using “DesignBuilder v5.5” to perform a thermal and energy analysis. The results show that choosing a multilayered isolated envelope such as double red brick isolated wall will likely affect positively the level of the indoor thermal comfort.