Abstract
As it becomes more and more relevant to renovate existing buildings with energy efficiency as top priority towards a nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB) stock, the need for new super-insulation materials to penetrate the construction market increases. A promising option is to incorporate vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) into an External Thermal Insulation Composite System (ETICS) - one of the most popular coating solutions used for insulating building walls. However, the widespread commercialization of VIP solutions for buildings still faces some uncertainties, such as regarding the long-term performance of the panels or the significance of the edge thermal bridging effects. In this context, studying onsite wall applications is of major importance in order to evaluate the actual performance of this innovative multilayer coating system under real exposure conditions.In this paper, the thermal behaviour of an ETICS façade incorporating a VIP insulation is studied. The building being retrofitted is located in Warsaw, Poland. Measurements of temperature, absolute humidity and heat flux are presented and discussed. Data is simultaneously recorded for a VIP ETICS wall and an adjacent conventional polystyrene-based ETICS wall. The VIP edge thermal bridging effect is also analysed. The thermal transmittance of both walls is estimated based on the experimental measurements. Furthermore, a computational algorithm for determining the thermal transmittance coefficient of the existing and the retrofitted wall based on temperature measurements is proposed. Additionally, a periodic infrared thermographic inspection is carried out during the 24-month monitoring period to identify anomalies.It was found that the VIP thermal resistance contribution is significantly higher than conventional expanded polystyrene-based solutions, even at the joint area between panels. No panels with vacuum loss or other anomalies were found during the monitoring period. The computational algorithm results based on the measurements were found to be accurate when compared with the predicted theoretical U-values.
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