No abstract

New building materials and technologies that provide thermal comfort are expected to gain popularity in the recent past. Hence, efforts to incorporate new building materials are needed to protect populations from the threats of thermal stress that cause an increase in temperatures due to climate change. The earth is identified as the most effective building material to improve the thermal comfortability inside the building. Among several building construction materials, the flooring material provides a more effective role with respect to thermal comfort in a building. This paper presents the evaluation and comparison work carried out to investigate the thermal performance and user perception of newly invented soil based flooring material with other common floorings in Sri Lanka. Temperature measurements were taken on the top surface of flooring materials and were compared the surface temperature of each other and indoor air temperature. User perception was taken through a questionnaire survey by involving hundred and twenty numbers of responses. The results reveal that the soil floor shows a lesser surface temperature at a significant level than the other floorings. Hence, it can be proved that the building construction materials play an important role and earth is one of the most sustainable materials with respect to the indoor thermal comfortability thus, end-user.