Improving the Design of Greek Hollow Clay Bricks

The hollow clay brick is the typical building unit that is employed not only over the whole Greece but also in many other Mediterranean countries. Nevertheless, its design is completely empirical. In this study, the design of the hollow clay brick is analyzed by employing a finite element package. To carry out this analysis, the thermal conductivity of the solid clay is measured by the transient hot-wire technique. As a consequence of the analysis, an improvement of 24 % in the design of the hollow clay brick is proposed.