This study aims to analyze the behavior of natural and waste materials when applied to building brick for walls of residential buildings on the indoor temperatures and thermal comfort of residential buildings. In this study, small-scale residential rooms were built during a period of hot weather in Egypt. A comparison between models and a reference model using the traditional burned clay brick was conducted. The results indicate that the mud-brick leads to enhanced thermal behavior by 25% within comfort limits and the surface temperature difference could reach 4.3 K, whereas the compacted bricks achieve 15%, and the temperature difference was found to be 4 K; compared with the traditional fired bricks with 2.1 K surface temperature difference. Scanning electron microscopy showed large holes and cavities in the mud and compacted bricks. Whereas, in the fired clay brick small holes were observed; this difference in structure is hypothesized to lead to the difference in the thermal behavior of the bricks. The thermal conductivity(U), of the unfired mudbrick, was 0.27 W/m.K, U =0.32 W/m.K for compacted soil brick while burned bricks U=0.6 W/m.K. Based on the results, the combinations of rice husk as a waste material, mud, and compacted soil for brick lead to reducing cooling needs and sustainable building materials for new buildings in the hot and dry climate in Egypt.

With the increasing interest in energy-efficient building design, building energy simulation programs are increasingly employed in the design process to help architects and engineers decide which design alternatives save energy more. This research is an empirical and analytical study using a ready-made software package to evaluate the energy efficiency performance of building envelopes using recycled waste material. These methods used available environmental alternatives material in the experiment. To verify the results, two practical cases are tested. Validation is examined by comparing experimentally measured data and computational simulation data during the same summer period time. Real cases with small-scale actual rooms that were used to generate data to validate numerical models. The focus of this study is to compare the experimental measured thermal behavior of traditional and waste materials in residential buildings with simulation results. This comparison allows determining the effect of using waste material in southern walls of a residential building at an indoor temperature during hot summer days, in which the measurements took place during June and July. Meanwhile, the results indicated that the indoor temperature of real models was higher than the temperature of simulation models with about 3°C to 6 °C at measuring time (six summer days). This increase is about o 5.4% to 11.8%. The findings also revealed that the use of waste material in the southern wall of a residential building could decrease the indoor temperature by about 0.2 - 3°C degree compared with the traditional material at the same wall. It means that waste materials in southern walls could decrease 0.9% to 4.1% of indoor temperature compared with traditional materials. This study found that the analytical and empirical small-scale models could contribute to determining the usage of waste material at southern walls of residential buildings. Also, the comparison of the results indicates that Design-Builder can predict indoor temperature to achieve thermal comfort with good accuracy and it can be used by researchers and designers to evaluate the thermal performance of buildings.