Performance of straw bale houses in tropical climatic condition

Abstract

Past few decades’ construction industry has become the major contributor to the depletion of natural resources and destruction of nature through Global Warming. On top of all the energy crisis and high energy cost forcing on innovations, which can leads low running cost. Due to all, presently there is a high trend to do research on sustainable construction methods. These techniques are varying country to country, since the climatic conditions are changing with their locality. Even though the roof is the main heat gaining element in a building, walls also add considerable amount of heat to the indoor volumes. Straw bale was considered as a low cost sustainable walling material for many decades due to so many inbuilt qualities, such as low cost, durability and low conductivity. The objective of this project was to identify the effectiveness of Straw Bale as a passive element in Tropical Conditions. Straw walls were compared with other common walling materials using computer simulations together with taking actual measurement in real scale buildings, which are located in the same vicinity. The observations clearly show that the thermal performances of straw bales are much better than other common walling materials used in Sri Lanka.