Developing a didactic thermal chamber for building envelope material testing

Abstract

In this paper, we present a didactic thermal chamber. This chamber has been developed for educating architecture students about building envelopes and their effects on resident comfort. The chamber is equipped with an instrumentation system capable of recording temperature data for different geometric points on the chamber. The chamber was successfully used to compare the thermal transmittance behavior of building blocks using different compositions. Results showed that adding polystyrene aggregate in the traditional cavity concrete block increases its thermal resistivity by 50%. With the developed apparatus, students are able to understand and visualize the thermal behavior of buildings.