Investigación de la resistencia térmica de ladrillos de arcilla perforados mediante modelos numéricos = A thermal resistance investigation of red colored perforated clay bricks by numerical modeling

One of the most important factors affecting the thermal behavior of building exterior walls is the thermal conductivity of red fired horizontally perforated hollow clay bricks which are widely used in many buildings in our country. The bricks commonly encountered in the exterior walls have dimensions of13.5x19x19cm. In this study, two different types of the bricks were chosen to be analyzed. One type is a 13.5x19x19cm horizontally perforated standard hollow brick and the other type is a 13.5x19x19cm horizontally perforated hollow brick with sytropor board installed in some of the hollows. The conjugate conduction and natural convection heat transfer in these brick types was studied numerically to compute the overall thermal conductivity of the bricks and the further aspects such as the brick production and design were also investigated. The energy, the momentum, and the mass transfer equations associated with the brick models were solved numerically by employing the commercial software called ANSYS. The air velocity distribution in hollows and the typical temperature distribution were shown in figures, and the thermal conductivity as a function of temperature difference were determined and the thermal conductivity results were compared with those given in the standards. The results show that the thermal conductivities of the bricks with and without sytropor board are almost half of those given in the standards. Therefore, it can be said that the values given in the standard are considered to be extremely conservative. The results also show that the natural convection occurring in air cavities affects the thermal conductivity by 0.046% and 0.068% in cases of with and without sytropor board, respectively.