Behaviour of a lightweight external wall under Mediterranean climatic conditions

The increasing development and use of new lightweight building technologies makes more urgent the evaluation of their energy performance. It is even more necessary in climatic contexts, like the Mediterranean basin, in which the effect of the solar radiation during the summer period should be lessened by high thermal masses. The study here presented deals with the assessment of thermal performance of an opaque envelope designed and built in Sardinia in 2013. The study is focused on the measurement the dynamic parameters of prebuilt wall, made of OSB panels and cellulose. The measurement is compared with the minimum requirements of Italian national standards. The analysis was carried out using a climatic chamber settled in the laboratories of the University of Cagliari. The chamber consists of two shells that create on both faces of a full-scale wall different hygro-thermal conditions. One of the shell simulates the external conditions while the other ones. The data were acquired to measure the heat storage capacity of the specimen, and then the dynamic parameters were calculated according to the EN ISO 13786:2008.