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It has been brought to our attention that the article [1], published in International Journal of Civil Engineering, is a republishing material from a previous publication published in Journal of Energy Engineering[2]. The editorial board of IJCE consider this action as an infringement of professional ethics and therefore the decision has been made to retract of the article.
 
The authors’ response provided by Journal of Energy Engineering to us, was not satisfactory from this journal's point of view for this unfortunate situation (the documents are kept in the journal’s offices). Any inconvenience this may have caused by authors to the Readers due to improper action of the authors should be apologized by them.
 
[1] “Application of Small-Scale Experimental Models for Thermal Comfort Assessment of Sustainable Building Materials” by S. P. Raut, S. A. Mandavgane, and R. V. Ralegaonkar. International Journal of Civil Engineering, Vol. 12, No. 4, Transaction A: Civil Engineering, December 2014
Received: May 2013, Revised: December 2013, Accepted: January 2014.  This article should be considered as retracted.
 
[2] Thermal Performance Assessment of Recycled Paper Mill Waste–Cement Bricks Using the Small-Scale Model Technique” by Sanjay Raut, Sachin Mandavgane, and Rahul Ralegaonkar. J. Energy Eng., 2014, 140(4): 04014001.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)EY.1943-7897.0000171
Submitted on April 9, 2013; approved on October 25, 2013; published online on October 29, 2013.
 

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Energy conservation in buildings plays a vital role for sustainable development of societies and nations. Although, newer buildings in developing nations are being constructed using energy conservation approach, existing buildings have higher energy demand to meet the desired comfort. Excessive energy demand for cooling the built environment is a major problem over most of the arid climatic zones. The problem is predominant in all the top storied buildings which are directly under exposed roof condition. In order to reduce the overheating of the roof surface a composite combination of reflecting-cum-insulating (R-I) material was developed. The sustainable materials viz., expanded polystyrene (construction waste), saw dust (industrial waste), and the false ceiling panels prepared from industrial waste were used for the development of sustainable R-I material. The R-I material was retrofitted over the existing roof of a model room in an educational building over composite climate (Nagpur, India) and was analyzed experimentally for the period of a year. The thermal resistance of the overall roof assembly was increased from 0.28 to 0.55 m² K/W, which in turn helped to achieve 16% of the duration of the year under thermal comfort. The developed R-I material has also an advantage of low cost (INR 900 per sq. m.) of installation as well as light weight (50 kg/m²) retrofitting solution. The R-I product can further be applied on larger roof areas by the designers to reduce the cooling load of the built environment as well as increase the occupants comfort over the local climatic zone.