Rammed earth buildings to meet Italian thermal regulation: monitoring and sample tests

Rammed earth has large thermal inertia due to its high density as to its hygroscopic properties and to the state changes of the water vapor component contained into the building material. That means a strong capability to store heat inside the wall and then drop it within rooms' environments with a considerable delay, as, at the same time, with certain attenuation of heat wave temperature peaks. Nevertheless rammed earth building heritage hardly can meet the thermal performances requests of Italian legislation. Paper pre-sents results of a thermal monitoring of a recently refurbished rammed earth building, in Piedmont, Italy; monitoring study results show an interesting rammed earth walls thermal behavior, when considered on a whole year cycle. In order to verify low insulated rammed earth wall ability to reach regional regulation, also laboratory thermal tests on rammed earth, coupled with lightweight earth samples, in dynamic and steady state conditions, were conducted.