Adobe as a sustainable material: A thermal performance

Sustainable construction is achieved using natural resources, such as adobe, in such a way as to meet economic, social and cultural needs, but not depleting or degrading these resources to such an extent that they cannot meet these needs for future generations. Earth is a cheap, environmentally friendly and abundant building material and has been used extensively for construction around the world. Today the prevalence of earth as a building material may be attributed to its proven durability demonstrated by the number of ancient earthen buildings that remain standing today. Scientific work have demonstrated that adobe has low thermal conductivity and high heat capacity enabling earthen building thermal stability compared with concrete building. Computational fluid dynamics has been proposed as a new tool to study the thermal behavior of earthen building. © 2010 Asian Network for Scientific Information.