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Characterization of the Thermal Transmittance in Buildings Using Low-cost

Temperature Sensors

Conference Paper · July 2022

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Characterization of the Thermal Transmittance in Buildings Using Low-cost
Temperature Sensors

Behnam Mobaraki1, *, Francisco Javier Castilla Pascual2, Fidel Lozano-Galant1, Rocio Porras
Soriano3, and Jose Antonio Lozano-Galant1
1
Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM).
Av. Camilo Jose Cela s/n, 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain.
2
Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM),
MAEE-UCLM Research Group, Instituto de Tecnología en Construcción y Telecomunicaciones,
16071, Cuenca, Spain.
3
Department of Applied Mechanics and Projects Engineering, Universidad de Castilla-La
Mancha (UCLM). Av. Camilo Jose Cela s/n, 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain.

*
Corresponding email: behnam.mobaraki@uclm.es

Keywords: Thermal monitoring, Transmittance parameter, Building envelope, Low-cost sensor,

Arduino microcontroller.

SUMMARY

Estimating transmittance value is a decisive factor to calculate the rate of energy scape in buildings.
Various methods are available to determine this parameter in the literature and practice. However,
they have some inconveniences (such as the fact that they are traditionally based on a limited
number of measurements and expensive instrumentation). This paper introduces the application of
low-cost sensors for the thermal monitoring of buildings. To do so, on the basis of the temperature-
based method (TBM), an Arduino-based data acquisition device was developed to infer the
transmittance parameter of building envelopes. This system is supported by an Internet of Things
(IoT) platform which provides low-cost postprocessing and saving of data. The potential of this
metering device has been shown by carrying out thermal monitoring of a box model in laboratory
conditions. Finally, to ensure the monitoring accuracy, the obtained results have been compared
with those obtained from ISO 10456/2007.

INTRODUCTION

Estimating the rate of energy loss in buildings due to poor insulation is a challenging task.
Accordingly, engineers are always seeking for efficient methodologies to determine the thermal
parameters of building envelopes. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature to carry
out thermal monitoring of buildings. For instance, heat flux meter method (HFM) is a common
non-destructive and standardized method used for estimating the thermal transmission properties
of plane building components. Calculation of transmittance value (U-value) in HFM is based on
direct measurement of the heat flow rate and temperatures on both sides of the element under
steady-state conditions [1]. So, it is needed to place at least one heat flow meter at the surface of
the element close to the more stable temperature, and two ambient temperature sensors to obtain
the transmittance value of the studying element. Afterward, by implementing the average method
the transmittance value will be obtained. The second approach is the temperature control box-heat
flow meter (TCB-HFM) [2]. The base of this approach is still based on installation of heat flow
meter on the structure and also using of guarded hot box. The third approach is simple hot box-
heat flow meter method (SHB-HFM) [3]. This method only requires heating equipment, which
reduces both the cost of the measurement system and the difficulty in obtaining measurements
compared to the TCB-HFM method. The next approach is temperature-based method (TBM) [4].
This method is based on measurement of three main parameters required for estimation of U-value
and they are as follow: the indoor and outdoor temperature of a building and the temperature of the
inner surface of the wall, considering a given value for the convective surface. Estimating thermal
behavior of buildings based on the reviewed approaches in the literature is burdened with
substantial uncertainties and difficulties when defining energy efficiency in buildings. At first, the
cost of thermal monitoring using the above said approaches (in terms of sensor instrumentations,
data processing, and data display) might be several thousand euros for a single measurement point.
Therefore, high density thermal monitoring of buildings is so costly and not all the people can
afford it. Take into account the high cost of sensors, recently, many scholars dedicated their
investigations to use of low-cost sensors for monitoring various parameters in buildings. Example
of deriving the thermal parameters of building envelopes using low-cost sensors can be found in
[5]. Badura et al. evaluated performance of several aspects of various low-cost ambient sensors
such as the operational stability, precision, and linearity of sensor responses [6]. Taking the
advantage of low-cost materials, Mobaraki et al. presented a novel image recognition technique for
intuitive understanding the behaviour of structures [7]. A systematic review of low-cost sensors for
monitoring of buildings in terms of structural and indoor parameters was presented by Mobaraki
et al. [8]. A second issue refers to data managing. Traditionally, the data captured from sensors are
collected and stored in the memory of the monitoring system and post-processing of them was
carried out by users. Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the best solutions that is
supporting real-time monitoring of buildings and low-cost processing of measurements. This
approach is one of the most widely used approaches which permits the interconnections between
sensors through Internet that also enables the monitoring systems to communicate with each other
and the data can be sent to IoT platform using WiFi. A review of IoT was presented in Ng and
Wakenshaw [9] where they discussed : IoT as a liquification and density of information resources,
IoT as digital materiality, IoT as assemblage or service system, and IoT as modules, transactions,
and services. According to the literature, IoT is a safe and low-cost approach to be considered for
monitoring systems.
This study presents a novel transmittance meter to derive transmittance of building envelopes. This
system is entirely based on low-cost devices such as sensors and microcontroller. Postprocessing
of the data in the proposed system is based on a free IoT platform. The proposed device operates
based on TBM method with multiple measurement of the three main parameters required to
estimate the U-value in TBM. This transmittance meter is also scalable, which can be used for
thermal monitoring of all sizes of building envelopes. To check the applicability of the proposed
system, an experimental study was carried out to infer transmittance of a small-scale wall element
with a temperature-controlled box model.
LOW-COST SENSORS
Currently, a number of low-cost sensors are available to derive the temperature of surroundings.
Examples of these sensors are the DHT22 [10] and SHT35 [11]. To measure surface temperature
of the objects, there some sensors in the market such as DS18B20 [12] and MAX30208 [13].
Among the reviewed sensors DS18B20 contact sensor and SHT35 contactless sensor were selected
for development of the transmittance meter to measure surface and environment temperature,
respectively. Sensor SHT35 is one of the most common sensors in the literature from measuring
environmental temperature. This sensor is a humidity and temperature sensor with a very wide
operation voltage range (between 2.15 and 5.5 V. This sensor allows to measure humidity and
temperature ranges between 0 and 100% RH and -40 °C and 125 °C, respectively. The accuracy
varies from ±0.2 °C for temperature and ±1.5 % RH for humidity. The operational time of this
device is 8 seconds. Table 1 presents basic information of the chosen sensors in terms of
application, detection range, accuracy, cost.

Table 1. Characteristic of the sensors used to develop a low-cost transmittance meter

Model Operation Application Detection Accuracy Cost
range (°C) (°C) (€)
DS18B20 Contact Environment [-55 to 0.5 4.9
al & 125]
structural
SHT35 Contactless Environment [-40 to 0.2 5.8
al 125]

MICROCONTROLLER
Microcontrollers are small computers with processor, memory and etc. for physical computing and
controlling of a system. Arduino is an open-source software/hardware for making interactive
electronic objectives and it can be used for managing your installation by compiling sketches
(sending a set of commands) to the Arduino on the installation. Since development of the proposed
transmittance meter was based on a number of sensors as well as WiFi thus, Arduino MEGA 2560
was chosen as basis of the sensor development. Figure 1 (a) and (b) show connection of a single
sensor of DS18B20 and SHT35 to Arduino MEGA.

(a) (b)
Figure 1. Schematic of the sensor connection to Arduino MEGA: (a) sensor DS18B20, and (b)
sensor SHT35.
TEST DESCRIPTION
This section introduces information about the indoor and outdoor module of the monitoring system
as well as box model considered for this study. It has to be mentioned that to increase precision of
the monitoring system, indoor and outdoor temperature of the box model were measured using 8
sensors of SHT35, and the surface temperature was measured using 8 sensors DS18B20. In fact,
increasing density of monitoring not only enables statistical analysis of data, but also allows high
density thermal monitoring of heterogeneous building envelopes. Figures 2 (a) and (b) show the
developed 8 sensors of DS18B20 (to measure indoor surface temperature) and SHT35 (to measure
indoor/outdoor temperatures) for the thermal monitoring system.

(a) (b)

Figure 2. The developed sensors to measure surface temperature (a) and indoor/outdoor
temperatures (b).

The box model used in this experiment had dimension of 40 cm × 40 cm × 40 cm. A 9-layer
plywood with dimension of 25 cm × 25 cm × 2 cm was considered as a wall in one of the faces,
three other walls were isolated with polystyrene board with dimension of 25 cm × 25 cm × 2 cm.
An incandescent lamp with a covering steel cap were devised as a heating source and the indoor
temperature was keeping virtually constant by a heating thermostat. Figure 3 illustrates the
schematic of the box model. In this test (measurements of the indoor and outdoor temperature as
well as the temperature of the inner surface of the plywood wall) the protocol followed was
conducted for 17 hours continuously and the sensors were adjusted with sampling frequency of 5
minutes. The indoor and outdoor temperature of the box are set to be 40 °C and 25 °C, respectively,
to represent the steady state condition.

Figure 3. The temperature control box model.

IoT PLATFORM
With the aim of real time monitoring of data and inexpensive data processing, the use of an IoT
platform for the system management was proposed. There are multiple IoT platforms available to
give services to companies and engineers that wish to enhance quality of their services to the
customers. Example of the most popular IoT platforms are; Google Cloud IoT, IRI Voracity,
Particle, IBM Watson IoT, ThingSpeak, and Amazon AWS IoT Core. Among the mentioned IoT
platforms, ThingSpeak have received the most attention by scholars, recently. As depicted in figure
4, all the sensors’ data (including indoor, outdoor, and indoor surface temperatures) were
transferred to ThingSpeak IoT platform to carry out data saving and postprocessing of the data.

Figure 4. Schematic of the communication protocol for data saving and postprocessing of the
data in IoT platform.

Free service for non-commercial projects of ThingSpeak platform was used to for real time
monitoring of the data derived from the 3 modules. Figures 5 show the real-time monitoring of the
outdoor temperature derived from the outdoor module displaying on fields 3 of ThingSpeak (in
forms of chart and numerical display), respectively.

Figure 5. Real-time monitoring of outdoor temperature on IoT platform associated with sensor 1.

DATA ANALYSIS
Calculating the U-value of the plywood contrived in the box model (illustrated in figure 6) through
the proposed IoT transmittance meter was carried out base on equation 1:
∑𝑛
𝑗=1(𝑇𝑖(𝑗) −𝑇𝑠𝑖(𝑗) )
𝑈= ∑𝑛
ℎ𝑐𝑖 (1)
𝑗=1(𝑇𝑖(𝑗) −𝑇𝑒(𝑗) )

Where, 𝑇𝑖 is the indoor temperature (°C), 𝑇𝑒 is the exterior temperature (°C), 𝑇𝑠𝑖 is the indoor
surface temperature (°C), and ℎ𝑐𝑖 is the total internal heat transfer coefficient. According to ISO
6946: 2017 this parameter was considered as 7.69 𝑊 ⁄𝑚2 · 𝐾.
 Figure 6. The temperature control box model.

Variations of surface temperature of plywood as well as indoor and outdoor temperatures are
presented in figures 7 (a), and 7 (b) and 8 (a), respectively. According to the figure 7 (a), the
maximum difference between surface temperatures recorded by 8 sensors of DS18B20 was around
3 °C. In fact, this rate of difference between readings of the sensors is due to the poor contact of a
sensor (number 7) to the plywood, which was detected after termination of the experiment. The
minimum and maximum surface temperature captured by the sensors DS18B20 were 31 and 35
degrees (4 degrees of difference), respectively. However, for calculation of transmittance
parameter the average value of the 8 sensors is considered thus, the rate of difference for this
parameter decreases from 4 °C to 1.33 °C.
Variation of the indoor temperature recorded by 8 sensors of SHT35 is shown in figure 7(b). The
indoor surface temperatures considered to calculate U-value of the plywood were the average of
the 8 sensors and varied from 39.4 to 40.2 °C. Comparison of figures 6 and 7 indicates that variation
of temperature captured by a single sensor of SHT35 is less (0.8 °C) than that of the DS18B20 (1.3
°C). According to the information presented in commercial catalogues, the sensors SHT35 and
DS18B20 have accuracy of 0.2 °C and 0.5 °C, respectively.
36 42
(a) (b)
Temperature (°C)

Temperature (°C)

34
40
32
38
30 S-1 S-2 S-3 S-4 S-1 S-2 S-3 S-4
S-5 S-6 S-7 S-8 S-5 S-6 S-7 S-8
28 36
20.24.58

0.24.58
1.24.58
2.24.58
3.24.58
4.24.58
5.24.58
6.24.58
7.24.58
8.24.58
15.24.58
16.24.58
17.24.58
18.24.58
19.24.58

21.24.58
22.24.58
23.24.58

0.24.58
1.24.58
2.24.58
3.24.58
4.24.58
5.24.58
6.24.58
7.24.58
8.24.58
15.24.58
16.24.58
17.24.58
18.24.58
19.24.58
20.24.58
21.24.58
22.24.58
23.24.58

Hour Hour

Figure 7. Variation of temperature: (a) in terms of surface temperature captured by 8 sensors of

DS18B20 and (b) in terms of indoor temperature captured by 8 sensors of SHT35.

Figure 8 (a) shows variation of outdoor temperature captured by 8 sensors of SHT35. During the
test, the temperature of the laboratory (exterior temperature of the box) was controlled and adjusted
by means of air conditioning (AC) to provide the minimum difference of 10-15 °C between the
indoor and outdoor temperature of the box. According to the information presented in figures 7 (a),
7 (b), and 8 (a) the test was carried out in steady state condition, as the indoor and outdoor
temperature were not altered more than ±2°C and ±5°C respect to their initial values, respectively,
to satisfy provision of ISO 9869:2014.
Figure 8 (b) presents the calculated U-value at different time steps, based on the measurements
associated with the indoor/outdoor temperatures and indoor surface temperature presented in
figures 7, 8 and 9. Variation of U-value in figure 8 (b) is highly depends on difference indoor and
outdoor temperatures. In another words, the higher the difference of indoor and outdoor
temperature, the higher range of U-value acquired. In this case the calculated U-value were
oscillating between 3.30 and 3.44 𝑊 ⁄𝑚2 . 𝐾 with an average value of 3.43 𝑊 ⁄𝑚2 . 𝐾 . Comparison
of the obtained U-value for the plywood with the one derived from the ISO 10456/2007 (4.5
𝑊 ⁄𝑚2 . 𝐾 ), presents the difference of 18.6% for the results of the proposed transmittance meter.
According to the literature, this level of difference is in the same range as obtained in the literature
(with the same TBM approach) which can be explained by inherent uncertainties of the sensors as
well as the interactions between errors from different sensors used for installation of the
transmittance meter [3].

26 3.48
(a) (b)
Temperature (°C)

S-1 S-2 S-3 S-4

U-value (w/m^2.k)
25 S-5 S-6 S-7 S-8
3.44

24 3.4

23 3.36

22 3.32
15.24.58

20.24.58
16.24.58
17.24.58
18.24.58
19.24.58

21.24.58
22.24.58
23.24.58
0.24.58
1.24.58
2.24.58
3.24.58
4.24.58
5.24.58
6.24.58
7.24.58
8.24.58

3.28
14.5 15 15.5 16 16.5 17

Hour Ti-Te (°C)

Figure 8. (a) Variation of outdoor temperature captured by 8 sensors of SHT35 and (b) The
obtained U-value from the proposed monitoring system at different time steps.

CONCLUSIONS
This paper encourages the use of low-cost sensors to carry out high density thermal monitoring of
buildings. To this aim, an Arduino-based data acquisition system is proposed to derive U-value of
building envelopes. The proposed system works based on multiple measurement of parameters
required for estimation U-value (indoor temperature, outdoor temperature, and indoor surface
temperature of an object). This system is also low-cost in terms processing and storing of data, as
ThingSpeak IoT platform was adopted to the system to illustrate real-time monitoring and
calculation of data. To validate application of the proposed methodology, thermal monitoring of a
temperature control box was studied in laboratory and U-value of a plywood was obtained after 17
hours monitoring. During the experiment different U-values obtained at different time steps which
they were in the range form 3.30 and 3.44 𝑊 ⁄𝑚2 . 𝐾 . Finally, the average U-value of 3.43
𝑊 ⁄𝑚2 . 𝐾 was obtained for the studied plywood. To evaluate the performance of the developed
monitoring systems the obtained results were compared with those derived from ISO 10456/2007
and a 18.6% difference acquired between the experimental and theoretical results.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors are indebted to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for the funding
provided through the research projects BIA2013-47290-R, BIA2017-86811-C2-1-R, and
BIA2017-86811-C2-2-R founded with FEDER funds It is also to be noted that funding for this
research has been provided to Mr. BEHNAM MOBARAKI by the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness through its program for his Ph.D. It is also to be noted that part of this work
was done through grant number 2018-COB-9092 from Universidad de Castilla La Mancha
(UCLM).

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