Design Properties of Log Walls with Respect to Building Physics

The paper deals with the construction of walls of log wood houses of Canadian type in terms of thermal insulation, with the focus shifted onto the comparison of alternative structural solutions of such walls. The main aim of the research done was to assess the different Canadian type massive log wood walls, with various thermally insulating materials placed between the logs. The computer simulations of wall models did include a Final Element Method analysis in ANSYS software. Massive wooden walls unfortunately do hardly meet today's ever increasing requirements given for thermal resistance, heat conductivity and heat losses of a building, since the bed joints are weakened and also because of the thermal conductivity of wood itself. Thus, mainly the contact surface temperature was observed, which also became one of the evaluation factors describing the quality of construction. The main benefits of the paper is the list of surface temperatures (within the joint and on the logs) coming from simulations of joint solutions and insulating materials.