Material Aspect of Energy Performance and Thermal Comfort in Buildings

Modern design and construction strives to establish an appropriate relationship between three characteristic poles: man – the user, the building, and the environment. This chapter seeks to highlight this problem by considering the relevant characteristics of the building’s thermal envelope, i.e. the impact that the choice of materials has on the behaviour of the building as a whole. Today, we are intrigued by the behaviour of a building as a system, mostly through the prism of the amount of energy it consumes during its existence. On the one hand, this leads us to the need for adequate knowledge of the basic principles of building physics, and on the other, to the awareness of the relevant properties of the materials that we use in the construction process, in order to meet the comfort requirements of the user. Although this chapter emphasises the problem of meeting the thermal comfort requirements, in the example of the review and analysis of characteristic types of residential buildings in the Belgrade area, the scope of meeting the overall comfort requirements has been considered, as well as the interdependence that exists between different types of comfort (thermal, indoor air, sound, and light)