Thermal performance of lightweight concrete applications in building envelopes in Lebanon

Innovative building materials are being used in building envelopes for reducing their heating and cooling needs. This paper aims to assess the thermal impact of using lightweight concrete in Lebanese building constructions by pouring an 8 cm thickness of lightweight concrete on the roof and the slab and replacing traditional hollow concrete block by lightweight concrete blocks. Thermal properties of two different samples were experimentally determined: the first one (558 kg/m(3)) used for the roof and the slab and the second one (1074 kg/m(3)) used for the walls. Then numerical simulations were carried out for a Lebanese traditional detached house using the characteristics of these two samples. The thermally improved Light Weight Concrete building (LWC) was compared to a traditional Lebanese house base case (BC) using a dynamic building energy simulation tool in the four different Lebanese climate zones: coastal, mid-mountain, mountain, and inland zones. The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating LWC to building envelopes by reducing energy consumption and improving thermal comfort in both winter and summer climate conditions and in the different Lebanese climatic zones. The paper demonstrates that the use of LWC in the vertical walls replacing the traditional hollow blocks can reduce the heating needs by up to 9% and by up to 13% for cooling needs. On the other hand, adding a LWC roof screed has a very high impact on cooling and heating energy consumption, which can reach up to 74% in cooling energy savings and up to 24% in heating energy savings.