William M. McGinley and Li Liu
William M. McGinley, PE, FASTM, FTMS, Professor and Endowed Chair for Infrastructure Research, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Louisville, KY, m.mcginley@louisville.edu
Li Liu, Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Louisville, KY, releanlou@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Both the demand and cost of energy is increasing as the population and economy of the United States continues to grow. This has prompted more energy efficient buildings to be designed and
constructed. Although Energy Code provisions define alternative design methods that can be used to meet the energy efficiency requirements for a new building design, due to ease of use, most buildings are designed using the prescriptive approach. Contrary to current prescriptive energy code provisions, modern exterior uninsulated mass masonry walls are expected to perform better with respect to energy use when the thermal mass effects and reduced thermal conductivities are accounted for. However, as most designers will use the prescriptive provisions of the IECC version adopted by the state where they are designing, they will be likely underestimating the impact that high thermal mass and lower conductivity walls will have on the performance of the buildings. The following report describes an investigation designed to evaluate the impact light-weight low thermal bridging concrete masonry wall systems will have on the energy use of structures that are typically constructed with exterior mass masonry walls. Using three prototype commercial buildings based off the DOE building prototypes, a holistic energy study was conducted using a
variety of exterior wall configurations to improve the energy performance of baseline models in order to evaluate their energy performance in the seven different Climate Zones in United States.The results of this study will be presented in the paper.
KEYWORDS: energy analysis, uninsulated exterior light weight masonry walls
