THERMAL CHARACTERIZATION OF DIFFERENT MATERIALS FOR EXTENSIVE GREEN ROOFS

Extensive green roofs have been consolidated as a good tool for passive energy savings system in buildings, providing a more sustainable trend in the building field. Given that working with living organisms, the growth of vegetation is variable depending on external factors such as weather conditions, disease, etc. the coverage of plants cannot ensure uniformity and consequently the “shadow effect” cannot be considered as a constant parameter. On the other hand, materials used in substrate and drainage layers should provide a constant “insulation effect” depending only on its physical properties and water content. However, the complexity of disaggregated materials used in internal layers of extensive green roofs implies a lack of real data about its thermal properties. The main objective of this study is to determine experimentally the physical properties of different disaggregated materials from the internal layers of extensive green roofs. The experimentation allows to calculate the thermal transmittance in steady-state (U-value), the heat storage capacity, and the dynamic thermal response under daily thermal oscillation.