Full Description

Heat loss and gain through opaque building envelopes including walls, roofs, and floors significantly affect the overall energy consumption of buildings. To reduce this energy consumption, building envelopes must have excellent thermal insulation performance. However, the actual insulation performance of building envelopes varies depending on the components and the construction methods, even if the same insulations of identical thicknesses are used. These differences are a result of additional heat losses through thermal bridges, e.g., the wall-to-floor or wall-to-wall junctions in concrete walls and the joints between stone or metal panels in curtain walls. These thermal bridges degrade the actual insulation performance. This study aims to evaluate the thermal insulation performance of various external walls considering thermal bridges and to discuss methods for reducing thermal bridges. Three-dimensional steady state heat transfer simulations were conducted to analyze eight types of external walls with thermal bridges under winter conditions: paint-finished with either internal or external insulation systems, stone, and metal concrete walls and stone, metal-sheet either with or without additional insulation of steel trusses, and metal-panel curtain walls. The heat losses and effective thermal transmittances were calculated and compared to determine the heat-transfer characteristics of each external wall and to discuss possible methods for reducing thermal bridges.

Citation: 2016 Winter Conference, Orlando, FL, Conference Papers

Product Details

Published: 2016 Number of Pages: 8Units of Measure:DualFile Size: 1 file , 2.1 MB Product Code(s): D-OR-16-C054