Structural stability vs. thermal performance: old dilemma, new solutions

摘要

In many building envelopes, actual thermal performance falls quite a bit short of nominal design parameters given in standards. Very often only windows, doors, and a small part of the wall area meet standards requirements. In the other parts of the building envelope, unaccounted thermal bridges reduce the effective thermal resistance of the insulation material. Such unaccounted heat losses compromise the thermal performance of the whole building envelope. For the proper analysis of the thermal performance of most wall and roof details, measurements and three-dimensional thermal modeling are necessary. For wall thermal analysis the whole-wall R-value calculation method can be very useful. In ties method thermal properties of all wall details are incorporated as an area weighted average. For most wall systems, the part of the wall that is traditionally analyzed, is the clear wall, that is, the flat part of the wall that is uninterrupted by details. It comprises only 50 to 80% of the total area of the opaque wall. The remaining 20 to 50% of the wall area is not analyzed nor are its effects incorporated in the thermal performance calculations. For most of the wall technologies, traditionally estimated R-values are 20 to 30% higher than whole-wall R-values. Such considerable overestimation of wall thermal resistance leads to significant errors in building heating and cooling load estimations. In this paper several examples are presented of the use of the whole-wall R-value procedure for building envelope components. The advantages of the use of the whole wall R-value calculation procedure are also discussed. For several building envelope components, traditional clear-wall R-values are compared with the results of whole-wall thermal analysis to highlight significant limits on the use of the traditional methods and the advantages of advanced computer modeling.