Development and Testing of Light Weight Thermal Insulation for Green Building

Abstract

The energy demand is increasing day by day. In order to cope with this, either moreenergy should be produced or the available resources should be conserved. Amongthe dierent users of energy, residential and commercial buildings consume a lot ofenergy specially in terms of comfort air-conditioning. One of the ways to conserveenergy is to decrease the losses of heat by utilizing eective thermal insulations. Thepresent work reviews the various types of thermal insulations available in the market,the details of building insulations and its salient features. Also in order to improvethe properties of thermal insulations, new materials based on rice husk ash and othercompositions are developed. The tests undertaken and the testing procedures to ndits various properties are detailed in the report. The experimental results indicatethat the specimens prepared using rice husk ash and other constituents provide verygood heat transfer properties. It was found that while the rice husk ash improves thethermal properties, it also aects the strength of the insulation material adversely.The presence of vermiculite in the composition was found to improve the materialstrength. Hence a proper combination of rice husk and vermiculite provides theoptimum results in terms of thermal properties and strength. A suitable compositionfor the building insulation material based on the tests undertaken is proposed.