Effect of thermal insulation and ground coupling on thermal load of a modern house in Marrakech

The objective of this work is to improve the energy performance of a residential building in Marrakech. A study of the effect of thermal insulation of the envelope and the thermal inertia of the ground and furniture on heating/cooling loads was done. The building is a two floors house, built on-ground with an east-west orientation. North and south walls are affixed to the neighboring houses of the same type. The energy performance of the building are determined through a numerical study; which is achieved by dynamic multizone modeling of several configurations of the house using the TRNSYS software. The simulations were performed over a year through TMY weather file. To validate the simulation results, a monitoring for each area of the house was realized. The simulation results show that the roof insulation can reduce the heating/cooling loads by 11% and 53% respectively. In addition, the external walls insulation by an air gap allows us to reduce the heating and cooling loads by 27.4% and 16.7% respectively. Moreover, coupling the building with the ground reduces the average temperature of the ground floor by about 4 °C in summer, and increases it by approximately 1°C in winter. On the other hand, the thermal inertia of furniture has a negligible effect on the heating and cooling loads. It reduces the cooling load by almost 1.2%, while it reduces the thermal load during the winter season by 1.1%.