Vacuum Insulation Panels: Analysis of the Thermal Performance of Both Single Panel and Multilayer Boards

Alfonso Capozzoli,Marco Perino,Stefano Fantucci,Fabio Favoino

doi:10.3390/en8042528

Alfonso Capozzoli, Marco Perino + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/en8042528

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Journal: Energies	Publication Date: Mar 31, 2015
Citations: 62	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Polytechnic University of Turin, University of Cambridge

Abstract

The requirements for improvement in the energy efficiency of buildings, mandatory in many EU countries, entail a high level of thermal insulation of the building envelope. In recent years, super-insulation materials with very low thermal conductivity have been developed. These materials provide satisfactory thermal insulation, but allow the total thickness of the envelope components to be kept below a certain thickness. Nevertheless, in order to penetrate the building construction market, some barriers have to be overcome. One of the main issues is that testing procedures and useful data that are able to give a reliable picture of their performance when applied to real buildings have to be provided. Vacuum Insulation Panels (VIPs) are one of the most promising high performing technologies. The overall, effective, performance of a panel under actual working conditions is influenced by thermal bridging, due to the edge of the panel envelope and to the type of joint. In this paper, a study on the critical issues related to the laboratory measurement of the equivalent thermal conductivity of VIPs and their performance degradation due to vacuum loss has been carried out utilizing guarded heat flux meter apparatus. A numerical analysis has also been developed to study thermal bridging effect when VIP panels are adopted to create multilayer boards for building applications.

Highlights

In recent years, a great deal of effort has been dedicated to developing new technological solutions with the aim of reducing the heating and cooling energy consumption of buildings
The thermal bridge is only caused by the presence of the vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) envelope (“no joint” cases) (It is worth noting that this configuration is the one that is usually investigated and reported in the literature)
The results of the numerical analysis demonstrate that the influence of thermal bridging due to the structural joints is remarkable compared to the effects of the VIP envelope alone, without the joints

Summary

Introduction

A great deal of effort has been dedicated to developing new technological solutions with the aim of reducing the heating and cooling energy consumption of buildings. Some barriers have to be overcome in order to penetrate the building construction market and to be widely adopted by designers These materials show remarkable potential for reducing energy consumption, few investigations have been carried out so far to evaluate their effectiveness in real building applications. The researches so far developed have mainly focused on the thermal bridging effect in VIP panels, just taking into account their material properties and the air gap between adjacent boards [17], while the influence of the overall structure of the multilayer wall, together with the structural thermal joints between panels, has seldom been investigated (see e.g., [6,7,18,19]). The usually adopted procedures make use of guarded heat flux meter apparatus, whose lower detection limit is around the value of the equivalent thermal conductivity of the best performing materials currently on the market

Aims

Measurement of the Center-of-Panel Thermal Conductivity

Performance Decay Due to Damage

Findings

Discussion

Conclusions