ANALYTICAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY OF A THERMAL WALL WITH PET BOTTLES

Abstract

The present work addressed a study, starting from the analytical equations that govern heat transmission, followed by a numerical modeling for the formulation of an algorithm capable of simulating the conduction of one-dimensional heat in transient regime of a thermal wall composed of ceramic bricks and PET bottles inside. The algorithm was implemented in Matlab and uses the Explicit Finite Difference Method in the process of discretization of the thermal diffusion problem. Three main aspects became the focus of this research, the first was the comparison of the simple masonry wall with the wall composed with fragments of the PER bottle, the second was the variation in thickness of the inner layer containing PET and finally the variation of the materials that make up the inner wall. With the results of the simulations it was possible to evaluate the use of PET bottles as a good thermal insulator of walls, with an improvement of 17.79%, in considerable thermal insulation compared to conventional walls of only masonry, it was also proven the influence on the increase of thickness with the reduction of thermal load, in addition to also ratifying that,  the PET wall, compared to other types of insulators such as wood, rubber and masonry, presented a much better response.