Detailed thermal transfer through an innovative wall section

The reliable estimation of buildings energy needs for cooling and heating is essential for any eventual thermal improvement of the envelope or the HVAC equipments. This paper presents a new method to evaluate the thermal performance of a massive wall by decomposing the external forcing temperature by means of the Fourier transform. The method is based on the EN ISO 13786 procedure by using the Taylor expansion for the elements of the quadrupole matrix; a specific attention will be done to the second and fourth order. The Fourier transform of the temperature is obtained by adding a constant temperature to a sum of sine and cosine temperatures; so the thermal flux through the wall is obtained by adding the different responses to each separate excitation signal. The method is applied to an innovative wall section called COWOB^© 2040 in a high mountain Lebanese climate using the weather data of the village of Hrajel, it is a versatile, rapid, cost effective and highly advanced building technology which uses a prefabricated permanent formwork system with a unique blend of concrete to deliver outstanding building performance. In addition a condensation study was made to the COWOB technology to check the risk of an eventual condensation.