@Chichihuil, an interesting thesis!
I agree with your choice of THERM. Assuming you aren’t doing anything too exotic with the insulation, then the majority of your heat transfer will be through thermal bridging in your construction. THERM has certain limitations in that it only simulates steady-state conditions[1] and only models 2d planes, but I think both these constraints are good simplifications to make given the overwhelming impact of insulation on the wall thermal performance relative to the more marginal impact of transient processes or 3D details.
However, if your wall doesn’t have insulation, then you may need a more representative simulation engine. I would suggest one, but I am a little unclear on your thermal performance optimization strategy in relation to a typical insulated wall. In particular, I am skeptical of this claim:
a wall with a certain interior printed design could be more thermally efficient than a hollow wall or one with traditional insulation.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your claim, but I don’t see how an uninsulated wall construction can outperform the thermal performance of a typically insulated wall through geometry optimization alone. I can imagine some exceptions:
- An extremely deep, thermally massive wall (i.e. multi-layer masonry) that could buffer heat flow enough to compete with a minimally insulated wall, but that isn’t more efficient in terms of cost or material quantity.
- A (very unconventional?) hollow construction with sealed air or thermally inert gas, essentially acting like a window. However if you don’t have that seal, the insulating effect of the hollow should be marginal. The air temperature of the hollow construction should approximate the exterior ambient air on average, and the insulating effect of the air film on the surface relatively small, relative to actual insulation.
- Moderate climates where the exterior air temperature is already within thermal comfort setpoints. In this case I can see how a 3d printed wall can outperform a typical insulated assembly by optimizing just radiant and convective heat transfer, independant of the conduction across the envelope. In this case, the optimization would have to address something other then average energy impact, since the baseline climate doesn’t have a large thermal energy need. So the focus here would shift to thermal performance during extreme cold/hot periods, or thermal comfort.
Outperforming a typical hollow construction with geometry seems reasonable, although I’m not sure if the thermal improvement would be significant against dominating impact of insulation layer.
Am I missing something? How can your 3d-printed wall compete with a typically insulated wall with just an interior print?
[1] Last I heard, THERM was in the process of releasing a transient-state simulation, but I’m not sure if the old Honeybee-legacy components will work with that release.