Thermal Mass in Buildings
Thermal mass is effective in improving building comfort in any place that experiences these types of daily temperature fluctuations—both in winter as well as in summer. When used well and combined with passive solar design, thermal mass can play an important role in major reductions to energy use in active heating and cooling systems. The terms heavy-weight and light-weight are often used to describe buildings with different thermal mass strategies, and affects the choice of numerical factors used in subsequent calculations to describe their thermal response to heating and cooling. In building services engineering the use of dynamic simulation computational modelling software has allowed for the accurate calculation of the environmental performance within buildings with different constructions and for different annual climate data sets. This allows the architect or engineer to explore in detail the relationship between heavy-weight and light-weight constructions, as well as insulation levels, in reducing energy consumption for mechanical heating or cooling systems, or even removing the need for such systems altogether.
Read more about this topic: Thermal Mass
Famous quotes containing the words mass and/or buildings:
“When over Catholics the ocean rolls,
They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals,
Because, till people know what’s come to pass,
They won’t lay out their money on the dead—
It costs three francs for every mass that’s said.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)