An accurate assessment of a building's wall performance, defined through the thermal transmittance, is essential to compute the annual energy consumption. Analyzing opaque surfaces, the heat transfer across walls can be modeled by an electro-thermal analogy, based on resistors series, crossed by a one-dimensional heat flow. This analogy is well established and it refers to stratigraphy composed of homogeneous materials. When dealing with inhomogeneous materials, possibly including hollow bricks, the wall's thermal transmittance is evaluated by means of an effective conductance. However, in order to verify the theoretical models effectiveness, a comparison with in situ measurements is needed. In this paper, three building walls characterized by different stratigraphy have been analyzed; by employing a heat flow meter investigation. Measurements results and estimated thermal transmittance values-calculated applying the standard UNI EN ISO 6946-have been compared.
This study aims to highlight the importance of thermal inertia in buildings. Nowadays, it is possible to use energy analysis software to simulate the building energy performance. Considering Italian standards, these analyses are based on the UNI TS 11300 that defines the procedures for the national implementation of the UNI EN ISO 13790. These standards require an energy analysis under steady-state condition, underestimating the thermal inertia of the building. In order to understand the inertial behavior of walls, a cubic Test-Cell was modelled through the dynamic calculation code TRNSYS and three different wall types were tested. Different stratigraphies, characterized by the same thermal transmittance value, composed by massive elements and insulating layers in different order, were simulated. Through TRNSYS, it was possible to define maximum surface temperatures and to calculate thermal lag between maximum values, both external and internal. Moreover, the attenuation between external surface temperatures and internal ones during summer (July) was calculated. Finally, the comparison between Test-Cell's annual energy demands, performed by using a commercial code based on the Italian standard UNITS 11300 and the dynamic code, TRNSYS, was carried out.
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