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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. OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2015, 8 2529

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The use of Phase Change Materials (PCM) in different building applications is a hot topic in today's R&D activities. Numerical simulations of PCM-based components are often used both for research activities and as a design tool, although present-day codes for building performance simulation (BPS) present some shortcomings that limit their reliability. One of these limitations is the limited possibility of replicating the effects given by thermal hysteresisa characteristic of several PCMs.

Vacuum Insulation Panels (VIPs) are characterised by very low thermal conductivity, compared to traditional insulating materials. For this reason, they represent a promising solution to improve the thermal behaviour of buildings, especially in the case of energy retrofitting (where a higher performance and less thickness is desirable). VIPs are insulating components in which a core material is surrounded by an air tight envelope which allows a high degree of internal vacuum to be maintained. Such features, on the one hand, allow excellent thermal insulation properties to be achieved, but, on the other, require the manufacturing of prefabricated panels of fixed shape/size. This means that the use of these super insulating materials in the building envelope involves the problem of joining the panels to each other and of fixing them onto additional supporting elements. As a result, purposely studied supporting structures or systems are required. However, these structures and systems cause thermal bridging effects. The overall energy performance of the resulting insulation package can therefore be affected to a great extent by these additional elements, and can become significantly lower than that of the VIP panel alone. In order to verify the incidence of thermal bridges on the overall energy performance of an insulation system that makes use of VIP panels, an experimental campaign has been carried out using a heat flux meter apparatus and analysing different joint materials/typologies. First, a measurement method was proposed, tested and verified on the basis of data from the available literature. A series of measurements on different samples was then performed. The experimental results were then used to calibrate and verify a numerical

The study investigates the thermal performances of Phase Change Materials (PCM) integrated in a roof space to be used as a residential attic in Torino, Italy. Three different solutions were applied to a roof continuously monitored under summer climatic conditions. The roof was divided into three portions, one, the bare roof, representing the reference case without PCMs, the other two integrating two PCM’s typologies with different melting/solidification temperatures range.\ud A numerical model was furthermore developed implementing the equivalent capacitance numerical method to describe the substance phase transition and the measured data set were used for its validation. The study demonstrates that PCM-enhanced components are a promising solution toward a higher thermal performance efficiency in roof attic spaces during the summer season.\ud Experimental results showed a reduction of the ongoing heat peak load between 13% and 59% depending on the PCM typology, highlighting that to reach the expected performance the proper PCM type should be carefully selected