Revitalisation of Lightweight Cladding of Buildings

Abstract

The basic function of building cladding is to protect the interior against the effects of the external environment. To fulfil this function, cladding must have good thermal and technical properties. The development of construction industry in the then Czechoslovakia after World War II led to higher demands on the construction of administrative and civil buildings in terms of capacity and speed of construction. To achieve these aspects, the construction industry was industrialised. The execution of building cladding with light prefabricated structures allowed to pre-define the required product quality and guarantee its sustainability for the time. On the other hand, due to technological indiscipline, low durability of used materials, poor sophistication of construction details and thermal and technical parameters of the structure, there were many problems which resulted in gradual degradation of these structures and increased necessity of their revitalisation. There are many ways to revitalise these structures on the Czech construction market. In general, contemporary revitalisation systems can be divided into three basic groups. These groups represent the individual stages of revitalisation. The first stage of revitalisation is simply the replacement of window panes. Another (second) stage is the replacement of window panes together with the modification of the panel part of the original structure. The last (third) stage is a complete replacement of the existing cladding with a new one. To evaluate the effectiveness of revitalisation, it was necessary to create a simulated building to which the design variants of these revitalisations were applied. It is clear from the simulation results that the best result is achieved in the second stage of revitalisation, where the window panes are replaced and the panel part of the original cladding is modified. This achieves the optimum ratio of expended financial costs for revitalisation and improvement of the thermal and technical properties of the structure.