Speaker
Description
Prefabricated buildings have started attracting significant interest, not only for the various, well-known advantages but also for their significant potential to support an efficient circular economy framework in the building and construction sector. This potential is mainly due to their ability to reuse, implement deconstruction or disassembly schemes at the end of their life, and allow easy and efficient construction waste separation, resulting in recycled material valorization. Beyond their end-of-life stage, their energy efficiency remains a critical factor for their overall environmental performance. Compared to conventional structures, the estimation of their thermal insulation performance may become a significantly more complicated issue during the design and the energy efficiency optimization of prefabricated buildings. Similarly, if treated through simplifications that successfully apply to conventional structures, the calculation error may contribute to further increasing the gap between the estimated and the actual energy efficiency of the building.
Such an investigation has been conducted within the framework of a research project aiming at developing advanced prefabricated buildings. The thermal insulation efficiency of prefabricated wall elements has been studied following the EN ISO 6946 method for multi-component elements, through Finite Element Methods and also experimentally, to investigate the accuracy, applicability and limitations of each method. The results show that, depending on the design and the materials used, the deviation between simple and advanced methods and measurements can be significant, leading to unwanted uncertainty regarding the thermal insulation performance of prefabricated elements. The research has provided many useful suggestions to consider when developing prefabricated elements to increase their overall sustainability.
| Keywords | U-value, prefabricated buildings, thermal insulation, thermal bridge |
|---|---|
| Topics | Facade engineering |
