Abstract
Since the middle of the 20th century many any buildings were built without any energy standards and still have a comparably poor energy quality. To obtain an overview of the current thermal quality of buildings in a whole city district, it may be promising to work with thermographic images obtained by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Aerial thermography represents a fast and cost-efficient approach compared to traditional terrestrial thermography. In this paper, we describe an approach to finding thermal bridges on aerial thermographic images and characterizing them in terms of their risk of mold formation, energy losses, retrofit costs, and retrofit benefits. To identify thermal bridge types that can be detected reliably on aerial thermographic images, we use a dataset collected with a UAV in an urban district of the German city of Karlsruhe. We classify and characterize 14 relevant thermal bridge types for the German building cohorts of the 1950s and 1960s. Concerning the criterion of mold formation, thermal bridges of window components, basement ceiling slabs, balcony slabs, floor slabs, and attics are found to be particularly relevant to retrofit projects. Regarding energy savings, the retrofit of thermal bridges of window sills, window lintels, and attics shows high potential. The retrofit of attics seems to be less attractive, when also taking into account the necessary retrofit costs.
Highlights
A significant share of global greenhouse gas and in particular CO2 emissions comes from the building and real estate sector [1]
As a result of our study, we provide in Appendix B a detailed thermal bridge catalog for German buildings constructed between 1950 and 1969
This catalog contains comprehensive information on the 14 relevant thermal bridge types identified in this study, provides exemplary aerial thermographic panorama images of each thermal bridge, and describes simple retrofit measures
Summary
A significant share of global greenhouse gas and in particular CO2 emissions comes from the building and real estate sector [1]. Buildings that have not yet been retrofitted consume up to five times more heating energy than modern buildings [2]. This is mainly caused by a lack of thermal insulation and thermal bridges. Thermal bridges cause energy losses of up to one third of the transmission heat loss of an entire building [8]. They lead to the collection of moisture, which can degrade the building fabric or cause mold formation [8]
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