Influence of Glass Powder Incorporated Foamed Geopolymer Blocks on Thermal and Energy Analysis of Building Envelope

Sustainability and energy efficiency of building are two of the many challenges that the modern-day construction industry is struggling to overcome. While, energy efficiency of a building may be achieved by reducing the overall energy usage to maintain comfortable dwelling condition, sustainability may be achieved by reusing a portion of large waste generated by industries and other sources. Therefore, an experimental investigation was carried out to develop a novel material, which improves the energy efficiency of the building and at the same time is sustainable in nature. The proposed material is obtained by foaming alkali activated blend of glass powder and fly ash. The alkali activated material is foamed to different degree to obtain a material with target density varying from 1500 to 1000 kg/m3 . The thermal and energy efficiency of the material was analyzed using hot disk and eQuest simulation tool, respectively. Furthermore, detailed thermal analysis is performed using an incompressible conjugate heat flow solver developed in an open-source platform in OpenFOAM. Numerically obtained few pertinent quantities were observed for all the cases such as temperature iso-surface variation through the solid-fluid zone, average temperature of internal room/fluid zone, Nusselt number at solid-fluid interface and temperature profile along the centerline in x -direction. The compressive strength test along with energy demand and cost analysis were also conducted on the foamed materials. The results show a saving of 8.94% and 10.47% in energy demand and usage during the operational stage of the building and the average temperature range in the fluid domain is observed significantly lower than 299 K compared to all other cases. All this can be achieved by adopting glass powder incorporated foamed geopolymer (FGP) blocks having satisfactory compressive strength of 11.3 MPa. Thus, the developed FGP blocks has social, technical and economic benefits over the conventional product.