A Study of Energy Saving in Building through Thermal Insulation with Plywood Inserted Honeycomb Sandwich Panels

The objective of this research is to examine the possibility of replacing the plywood-reinforced honeycomb sandwich panel for the conventional honeycomb sandwich panel as building materials. Three types of plywood were selected for study, i.e., chinese plywood, rubber plywood, and teak plywood, and the finite element simulation was performed to investigate the heat transfer. The result of the simulation showed that inserting plywood into the sandwich material could reduce the heat transfer content, especially the sandwich material inserted with chinese plywood which yielded the most efficient insulation, followed respectively by with teak plywood and rubber plywood. The result conformed to the heat conduction and heat resistance of the ASTM C 518 standards; therefore, the chinese plywood sandwich panels were used to construct the walls of a building so as to study the energy saving efficiency inside the building. The experimental result showed that the energy consumption content in the room with regular walls was 1.07 kw., whereas the room with the chinese plywood sandwich panel walls consumed energy merely 0.90 kw. The employment of chinese plywood sandwich panel walls thereby reduced the energy consumption by 0.17 kw. In other words, the room walled off with the sandwich panel walls could save more energy than that with regular walls. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.