EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF BUILDING BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

One of the conditions for the determination of conductive heat transfer through building walls is a knowledge of the heat exchanges at their boundaries and particularly the radiative and the convective heat transfer occuring at their surfaces. To study the influence of these two types of heat transfer, the authors have performed a combined experimental and numerical study. The experimental work consisted of building an experimental setup to satisfy a great variety of boundary conditions that may be encountered on building walls. It was composed mainly of an enclosure, a vertical, heated plate in which natural convection heat flow was generated, and a light source that imposed a known radiative flux condition on the solid surface. An inverse heat transfer method has also been developed. This numerical method gives the total heat flux leaving the vertical flat plate by conduction, together with surface temperatures. Then it is possible to use a simple thermal balance to determine the radiative and the conve...