Thermal comfort and energy efficiency monitoring of LSF residential buildings in the Southern European climate context

• Autor(a) principal: Langa, Helena Afonso
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/40034
• topic: Light steel framing buildings; Intermittent heating; Continuous heating; Southern; Energy poverty; Indoor thermal comfor; Thermal performance; Buildings energy efficiency; Test cells

Over the past decades, the construction sector in southern Europe (including Portugal) has been entirely based on traditional constructive systems and materials (concrete and masonry-HBM). Traditional constructive solutions were considered to have the best thermal performance and worldwide well-known behaviour and technology execution. However, in recent years, new construction solutions and technologies have been gaining relevance worldwide. More sustainable and industrialised solutions with lower associated energy demand, for instance, light steel framing (LSF), are pointed out as the future of construction. However, implementing this constructive system in many countries continues to experience some reluctance from the community, particularly from building users. The lack of information regarding the thermal and energy performance of this building system compared to the traditional systems is one of the main drawbacks of its implementation. Therefore, this work generally intends to fill the research gap by comparing the energy efficiency and thermal performance of these new constructive systems with the traditional ones. The work was based on the experimental monitoring campaign of two identical test cells representative of LSF and traditional constructive systems during the heating season (winter). The experimental monitoring campaign aimed to analyse the energy consumption, the responsiveness of the test cells to the heating system, and the influence of the outdoor climate on energy consumption in the test cells, considering different heating strategies (intermittent and continuous). In a second moment, the indoor thermal conditions in both test cells under free-running analysis (not considering the heating system) were assessed. In general, the LSF test cell registered lower energy consumption when compared to the HBM test cell. However, the LSF test cell presented significant fluctuations in indoor temperature, confirming that it is more influenced by the outdoor climate (outdoor dry bulb temperature and solar radiation). The results point to the risk of discomfort periods in the LSF constructive system, especially during warmer seasons.