Thermal and economic evaluation of new insulation materials for building envelope based on textile waste

Abstract

New thermal insulation materials made from textile waste based on acrylic and wool were developed using needle punching method. The aim of this work is to investigate the thermal performance of an external building wall outfitted with the developed insulation materials and submitted to the real climatic conditions of Casablanca, Morocco. A numerical finite volume model is developed and validated against the experimental results of a thermally controlled cavity at reduced scale. The numerical model is used to study the thermal performance of the considered wall in winter and summer season and to compute the annual heating and cooling loads. The thermal and energetic performances of the developed insulation materials are compared to the ones of some classical thermal insulation materials (i.e. Rock wool and Expanded polystyrene). Furthermore, a Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis is conducted with the local market cost in order to investigate the competitiveness of the new insulation materials and to seek the optimal insulation thicknesses. The results show that the developed thermal insulation materials are a competitive solution in terms of annual loads compared to the conventional thermal insulations. The optimum insulation thicknesses of the new materials and of the considered classical thermal insulations materials are determined using the LCC analysis. The effect of the specific cost of the developed insulation materials is studied and findings show that, the developed insulation can be a competitive solution if their initial cost don’t exceed 590 MAD/m3.