DETERMINATION OF THERMAL PERFORMANCE OF ROOF

K.Thirumaran, Jesna Mathew

Abstract: The thermal performance of roof is one of the most important aspects to achieve indoor thermal comfort in tropical buildings. The key element to determine the thermal performance is the heat transfer across the roof and its measurement. Heat transfer across the building roof system is now a crucial research topic that bears large consequences on energy consumption and conservation in buildings. Studies in this area require numerous analytical and numerical data validated by experimental results. This paper describes factors and a measuring technique of measurement that determine the thermal performance of roof. This measuring technique utilizes the capacity of thermocouple to measure the temperature difference between two places which are in contact with two different junctions of thermocouple. The main objective of this research is to experimentally validate the thermal performance of roof and also measuring technique using thermocouple. The material of roofing is an important parameter to determine the thermal performance. This research mainly focused on the thermal performance of reinforced cement concrete (RCC) roof which is used as roofing material in tropical houses and blamed for indoor thermal discomfort. This study uses an experimental approach in which three RCC slabs of varying thickness is heated and measured the heat transfer across them. This work presents an experimental set up to demonstrate the measuring technique by constructing three models of RCC slab of varying thickness and instrumented with thermocouple. Inner and outer surface temperature data is collected for each model by heating them for a day. The measurement procedure is detailed with an examination of the time lag for heat flow through the three models due to the effect of thermal mass.

Keywords: Roof thermal performance, Measuring technology, Thermo couple, Experimental set up, Time lag

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2017.0604012