Sustainable buildings/physical aspects of building materials

The sustainable building module addresses the integral sustainability of buildings, construction materials and products. This is done by considering the raw materials, way of production, as well as the environmental and technical properties of building materials, building products and the entire construction chain, including the possibilities of their recycling or re-use. Besides this material aspect, attention is also paid to sustainable land use, water and energy systems. The student will be able to assess buildings in regard to their sustainability, make basic designs of sustainable buildings based on the functional requirements, taking account of the four themes energy, materials, water and space.

The physical aspects of building materials modules deepens the relationship between materials behavior and their sustainability and durability. To this end, the physical properties of the material on different levels of observation, namely nano-, micro- and macro-level, is studied, conceptually, experimentally and numerically

At the end of this module, students should be able to:

1. summarize the main physical aspects that building materials possess, explain them from the angle of nano-, micro- and macro-structure; and explain how indoor environmental parameters are linked to and affected by building materials;
2. analyze the effect of physical characteristics of building materials on their final properties (durability, mechanical, fire resistance, etc.), select suitable techniques for fundamental studies of cementitious building materials;
3. design a concrete façade applying the given design techniques for a building envelope, following a performance design based methodology towards an optimized indoor thermal comfort and/or indoor air quality, and explain theoretically the performance of the designed materials in terms of different aspects (physics, mechanics, chemistry, etc.);
4. apply computational tools (e.g. Matlab) for numerical modeling of building physics related aspects.

• Assignments (3, assignment descriptions will be made available online)
• Building Ecology, P. Graham, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, ISBN 9780632064137, whole book, with except of Part III (this is only for reading)
• Lectures, oral information and PPs (pdf copies online)
• Materials for Civil and Construction Engineers (2nd ed.), M.S. Mamlouk, J.P. Zaniewski, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006, ISBN 0131477145, selected chapters (see the Table below)
• Transport Phenomena, Second Edition, R.B. Bird, W.E. Stewart, E.N. Lightfoot, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002, ISBN 0471410772, selected chapters (see the Table below)