Browsing by Author "Chamila, JPS"

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Influence of straw bale construction in air conditioning in tropical climatic condition
(2013-11-12) Halwatura, RU; Chamila, JPS; Somarathna, ABVPR
Due to heavy industrialization that took place after the Industrial Revolution, per capita energy consumption in the world has risen exponentially, depleting the planet’s limited energy deposits. As a result of most the modern technologies, unfavourable conditions on the environment are created. So, there is an urgent requirement to move towards the methods, which minimize the energy demand. Electricity demand in Sri Lanka is higher than its production and the usage of Air Conditioning is increasing day by day. Therefore, straw bale was identified as a feasible substitute to be used in addressing the increasing demand for A/C due to many reasons such as low initial cost, low conductivity and durability. Hence, studying on the long term performance of straw bale construction will be highly essential. On this regard, actual measurements were taken and were used to validate the computer simulations for straw bales and other walling materials to get the A/C demands for different cases. These findings were expanded to its life cycle by adopting them to an A/C building. Comparisons were made with other common walling materials available in Sri Lanka. It was noted that the straw walls can reduce the A/C demand of a building and hence it can lead to a low life cycle cost of the structure.
item: Conference-Full-text
Performance of straw bale houses in tropical climatic condition
(2013-11-13) Chamila, JPS; Halwatura, RU
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.