Modeling of heat and mass transfer in lateritic building envelopes

The aim of the present work is to investigate the behavior of building envelopes made of local lateritic soil bricks subjected to different climatic conditions. The building envelopes studied in this work consist of lateritic soil bricks with incorporation of natural pozzolan or sawdust in order to obtain small thermal conductivity and low-density materials. In order to describe coupled heat and moisture transfer in wet porous materials, the coupled equations were solved by the introduction of diffusion coefficients. A numerical model HMtrans, developed for prediction of heat and moisture transfer in multi-layered building components, was used to simulate the temperature, water content and relative humidity profiles within the building envelopes. The results allow the prediction of the duration of the exposed building walls to the local weather conditions. They show that the durability of building envelopes made of lateritic soil bricks with incorporation of natural pozzolan or sawdust is not strongly affected by the climatic conditions in tropical and equatorial areas.