Functional assessment of lightweight construction solutions in view of sustainability

Abstract

The amount of waste produced every year, the exhaustion of resources and the construction solutions currently used on construction may not be sustainable in the future. All these issues lead to the research of new construction techniques, the recycling of waste into use-ful materials, the re-use of construction materials, etc. Most of the new and innovative solutions arise from the general feeling that something should be done to change the conventional way of construction in order to give an answer to current society concerns: the reduction of energy con-sumption, the minimization of pollution problems, the maximisation of the use of renewable and/or recyclable materials, etc. The aim of this study is to evaluate the potentialities of using more lightweight construction solutions with respect to functional comfort criteria (thermal, acoustic and visual comfort) and to assess the relative merits of this type of construction in view of maximising sustainability. Beyond the structural behaviour of a building the demand of a bet-ter habitat requires also a good performance in terms of serviceability. In this work the perform-ance of lightweight construction solutions (optimized for reducing environmental impact) and conventional construction solutions were compared under the energy costs point of view (con-struction and heating). The acoustic performance was also studied, but just in order to achieve similar conditions, thus becoming not relevant to the purpose of this study.