Abstract
Buildings have a significant and continuously increasing impact on the environment. The power
consumption for comfortable housing is ever increasing, which is adding additional burden to the power
crisis of the world. The main objective of this project is to reduce the heat transfer through the building
roof by providing thermal insulation, thereby reducing the heat load on the building. Moreover, if the
building is to be air-conditioned then effective thermal insulation will reduce the power consumption
drastically and saves lot of energy consumption. New innovative type of insulation is proposed in this work
to reduce the heat transfer through roof structure by using seashells and coconut shells. The coconut shells
and seashells layer along with normal tiles will provide very good thermal insulation and it will maintain
low roof bottom surface temperature when compared with the normal conventional concrete roof without
insulation. Two identical experimental rooms were constructed on the top of the college mechanical
engineering department block and were instrumented with thermocouple and RTD along with data logger
for obtaining continuous experimental results. The amount of heat reduction provided by the insulated roof
structure was calculated using the analytical method. Then the cooling load requirement for airconditioning
and the corresponding energy cost per year was calculated for the new CAD lab of the
mechanical engineering department. The result showed the huge energy savings potential for this
innovative thermal insulation technique. The electricity savings obtained is around 39.7%. when compared
with the conventional concrete roof. This innovative technique for providing thermal insulation to the
building is more affordable and comfortable for living.
Keywords
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