Abstract
The increase of awareness with sustainability and the desire of reducing the energy consumption in the construction sector haved increased the application of External Thermal Insulation Composite Systems (ETICS) across Europe in the last decades. Nevertheless, the implementation of appropriate maintenance strategies is still neglected. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of different maintenance strategies. For that purpose, a condition-based maintenance model, based on Petri nets, is used to evaluate three maintenance strategies: MS1—total replacement only; MS2—combination of minor intervention and total replacement; and MS3—combination of cleaning operations, minor intervention, and total replacement. In the end, a multi-criteria analysis is used to discuss the impact of the three maintenance strategies proposed, evaluating the remaining service life, the global costs over time, the ETICS’ degradation condition, and the number of replacements (end of service life) over the time horizon. For this purpose, a sample of 378 ETICS was analysed, based on in situ visual inspections, carried out in Portugal. The results from this study reveal that maintenance plays an important role to increase the durability of ETICS, and therefore their sustainability. Regular maintenance can promote the extension of the ETICS’s service life between 88% and 159% (between 15 to 27 years), improve the global degradation condition of the ETICS, and reduce the impact on users by reducing the number of deeper interventions. Further research is essential to optimise the maintenance strategies (time interval between inspections, stakeholders’ performance criteria, and environmental exposure).
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundIn the last decades, with the increase of awareness of the concept of sustainability and the need of reducing the energy consumption in the construction sector [1], the application of External Thermal Insulation Composite Systems (ETICS) has increased across Europe [2].ETICS is an insulation system applied directly to façades, composed, in general, of a thermal insulation layer fastened to the substrate, a base coat and a finishing coat [2], being an excellent choice in rehabilitation [3,4]
The results from this study reveal that maintenance plays an important role to increase the durability of ETICS, and their sustainability
They show that the performance of regular maintenance activities allows increasing the service life and improving the degradation condition of the ETICS over time, corroborating, the observations of several previous studies [5,6,8,9,10]
Summary
Introduction and BackgroundIn the last decades, with the increase of awareness of the concept of sustainability and the need of reducing the energy consumption in the construction sector [1], the application of External Thermal Insulation Composite Systems (ETICS) has increased across Europe [2].ETICS is an insulation system applied directly to façades, composed, in general, of a thermal insulation layer fastened to the substrate, a base coat and a finishing coat [2], being an excellent choice in rehabilitation [3,4]. As for other façade cladding materials, maintenance is still unplanned, unsystematic, and cost-inefficient [5] Since it is a more recent solution To obtain more sustainable and durable ETICS over time, the increase of the knowledge about its characteristics and behaviour is fundamental. The durability of ETICS was studied by Edis and Türkeri [9], who refer that durability is dependent of the workmanship’s quality during the construction and the maintenance process. The authors conclude that the existence of defects increase the risk of vulnerability to premature degradation and, affects the ETICS’ performance over time. The author refers that lack of maintenance can reduce the service life from 16 to
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