Numerical Study of the Impact of Clay-Straw Walls on the Energy Performance of a Residential Building

摘要

The electricity consumption of buildings in Morocco represents 50.6% of the total final electricity consumption in the country, with a share of 33,6% for the residential sector. Cooling and heating of building represents a major part of this consumption, which can be reduced by the mean of passive energy efficiency techniques in buildings. Increasing the thermal inertia of the building and the thermal resistance of walls are two techniques that are investigated through this study. To include these two techniques to the building, clay-straw walls are used instead of concrete walls. The impact of using clay-straw walls on the energy demand for cooling and heating of the building is studied, in addition to the impact on air temperature in one room of the building. The results show that using clay-straw mixture in the building's walls reduced the heating demand by 54% and the cooling demand by 31.65%. Also, the dampening caused by the high thermal inertia of the clay-straw walls led to a decrease of the air temperature in the bedroom of about 3.8°C for the hottest day of July, while it increased the air temperature in the room by 4.2°C for the coldest day of January.