Design and Construction of a Simple Hot Box for Thermal Characterization of Building Envelopes

The continuous growth in building sector in addition to the required measures for energy efficiency in building envelopes have increased the need for ecological building materials. In order to decide if the newly developed materials are appropriate for building envelopes, their thermal transmittance should be tested. There are several methods for thermal characterization of building envelopes whether in lab or in situ, however most of them are expensive or have several limitations. To overcome these burdens, it becomes necessary to develop a required experimental setup with simple ways to achieve the desired purpose within certain acceptable errors. The following article describes the design and construction of a low-cost Simple Hot Box for thermal characterization of building envelopes, by means of Heat Flow Meter (HFM) method. The setup was designed and simulated using a computational fluid dynamic software CFD, and then it was constructed at the laboratory of Saint Joseph University, Lebanon. The thermal conductance of a commercial material was found and compared to its known values. The results were close with a little relative error indicating the ability to adopt this apparatus for preliminary evaluation of thermal transmittance of newly developed building materials with little cost and time.