Sustainable Housing Units for Emergency: Innovative Materials and Construction Techniques

The research presented in the following paper aims to develop a sustainable emergency construction system based on natural materials and reversible systems. The current need for temporary shelters has raised, due to the increasing number of disasters affecting urbanized areas or their significant degradation. A viable solution is the use of prefabricated elements, which guarantees benefits in terms of both costs, and speed of assembly and disassembly. A thorough design of the construction components guarantees the reversibility of the construction and therefore the reuse of the structure for the same or other purposes. However, the benefits provided by sustainable prefabricated constructions make these systems suitable for multiple uses, considering both the design and construction phase and the indoor comfort provided during the building life. In fact, during the planning phase, the life cycle assessment of the materials is taken into account, resulting in the choice of natural materials that involve little to no resources consumption. The aim of the study is to assess the thermal behavior of a few different coating panels built with natural materials, used in combination with the designed prefabricated system, in order to identify a range of values that can be set as reference for similar systems. The first part of the paper introduces the implemented construction system, while the second part focuses on the characterization of the envelope coating panels, in order to achieve optimal overall thermal performance. The characterization of the panel samples was carried out in laboratory using a heat flow meter.