Vernacular housing practices in Burkina Faso: representative models of construction in Ouagadougou and walls hygrothermal efficiency

In Burkina Faso, particularly in Ouagadougou, the walls of the houses are made of several local materials. The choice of a material implies a suitable constructive technique and an appropriate architecture. The walls are either earth-based, i.e. Compressed Earth Blocks (CEBs) or Adobe, or based on cement-based materials such as hollow concrete blocks. This paper proposes a description of the vernacular construction practices according to the material used for the walls and tries to explore the hygrothermal behaviour of various wall compositions. A hygrothermal simulation of a hollow concrete blocks wall and a CEBs wall using the WUFI®Pro software is carried out in order to compare the humidity flux passing through interior surface of each wall and to analyze the influence of integrated moisture in the calculation of heat flow. It is shown that, for CEBs wall, both thermal and hygrothermal simulation of heat flow give similar results.