Composite materials based on plaster and mineral additives for applications in buildings

Choosing the right building materials represents a considerable challenge in improving the indoor thermal comfort and performance. In this scenario, the interest on plaster based composite layers as insulating materials is increasing, particularly for new applications, such as insulating coatings for the building envelope, and it is worthy of investigation. Several research works are in progress to improve the building sector through the study of building materials with high quality of insulation and energy saving. In this work, new composite materials based on Safi plaster and additives (cement, clay, sand) were produced and evaluated experimentally to obtain low cost materials with improved thermo-physical and acoustic properties, to be used in building construction. Several samples made of 80% weight plaster and 20% weight of each additive were prepared and thermal, mechanical, and acoustic properties were compared with same properties of the plaster. The results show that it is possible to improve the performance of building plasters by adding mineral additives, especially thermal conductivity: values of 0.446, 0.403, 0.407, and 0.413 W/mK were found with 20% weight of cement, clay, sand and refractory cement, respectively, with an average reduction of about 26% with respect to the pure plaster (0.562 W/mK).