THERMAL BEHAVIOUR OF CONCRETE CELLULAR STRUCTURES

Abstract

Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, Singapore has ever growing energy needs for its economy, and energy use for cooling is a leading component of that energy demand. Minimizing the use of energy without sacrificing performance can decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Singapore’s extremely reliant on energy for cooling facing the point where 10% of CO2 is emitted due to cooling in buildings. Energy efficiency in cooling can be driven by improvement of thermal insulation of building envelopes. Developments arising from hitherto underutilized materials such as cellular concrete has shown themselves to be useful, where an increase in thermal insulation is achieved compared to conventional concrete. Research was conducted to optimize its thermo mechanical properties to replace conventional wall systems. In this paper, experiments have been done to discover if infilling clay into internal cellular concrete structures decreased thermal conductivity and increased material strength. The main focus was on the new Rectangular Grid structure and on the infilling of clay into Honeycomb and Grid patterned cellular concrete structures. It was compared to plain mortar, and Honeycomb without air-infill as well as bio-inspired Voronoi patterned concrete cellular structures. Results have shown that Honeycomb infilled with clay possesses the most optimal thermo-mechanical property in all porosity ranges, followed by Grid patterned concrete cellular concrete infilled with air in all porosity levels. Grid patterned cellular concrete infilled with clay has optimal thermal conductivity in the highest porosity ranges, whereas the medium and lower porosity had higher conductivity than plain mortar.