Assessment of Energy Rating of Polyurethane Spray Foam Walls: Procedure and Interim Results

Abstract

/npsi/ctrl?lang=en http://nparc.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/npsi/ctrl?lang=fr Access and use of this website and the material on it are subject to the Terms and Conditions set forth at http://nparc.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/npsi/jsp/nparc_cp.jsp?lang=en NRC Publications Archive Archives des publications du CNRCThis publication could be one of several versions: author's original, accepted manuscript or the publisher's version. / La version de cette publication peut être l'une des suivantes : la version prépublication de l'auteur, la version acceptée du manuscrit ou la version de l'éditeur. For the publisher's version, please access the DOI link below./ Pour consulter la version de l'éditeur, utilisez le lien DOI ci-dessous.http://dx.doi.org/10.1520/JAI102043Journal of the ASTM International (JAI), 6, 9, pp. 1-12, 2009-10-01 Asse ssm e nt of e ne rgy rat ing of polyure t ha ne spra y foa m w a lls: proc e dure a nd int e rim re sult s NRCC-50847Maref. W.; Elmahdy, A.H.; Swinton, M.C.; Tariku, F. October 2009A version of this document is published in / Une version de ce document se trouve dans:Journal of the ASTM International (JAI), 6, (9), pp. 1-12, DOI: 10.1520/JAI102043The material in this document is covered by the provisions of the Copyright Act, by Canadian laws, policies, regulations and international agreements. Such provisions serve to identify the information source and, in specific instances, to prohibit reproduction of materials without written permission. For more information visit http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/showtdm/cs/C-42Les renseignements dans ce document sont protégés par la Loi sur le droit d'auteur, par les lois, les politiques et les règlements du Canada et des accords internationaux. Ces dispositions permettent d'identifier la source de l'information et, dans certains cas, d'interdire la copie de documents sans permission écrite. Pour obtenir de plus amples renseignements : http://lois.justice.gc.ca/fr/showtdm/cs/C-42 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Assessment of Energy Rating of Polyurethane Spray Foam Walls: Procedure and Interim Results ABSTRACT:The application of polyurethane spray foam (SPF) insulation in buildings provides a durable and efficient thermal barrier. The industry is also promoting the SPF as an effective air barrier system in addition to its thermal insulation characteristics. In an effort to address these issues, a consortium of SPF manufacturers and contractors, jointly with the National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Research in Construction, (NRC-IRC) conducted an extensive research project to assess the thermal and air leakage characteristics of SPF walls as well as conventional wall assemblies. The objective is to develop analytical and experimental procedures to determine a wall energy rating (WER) that captures both the thermal and Airleakage performance of a wall assembly. The experimental part included two streams of testing: 1) to determine the wall air leakage rate at different...

3D heat and air transport model for predicting the thermal resistances of insulated wall assemblies

“…The results obtained for wall R-values with and without air leakage for the six walls presented in this paper, as well as for other walls that used medium density closed cell SPFs as thermal insulation [10,11], and new walls that are currently being built and tested at NRC-IRC, will be used to develop a simple engineering correlation for determining the Wall Energy Rating (WER) number for different types of wall systems.…”

“…Each wall specimen was made of a number of material layers. Before conducting thermal tests in the GHB, all wall samples before and after conditioning were tested at room temperature to determine their air leakage performance at different pressure differential across the wall according to ASTM E283 (ASTM 1997) (see references [10], [11] and [12] for more details). The extraneous air leakage (system air leakage) was determined for each wall assembly.…”

“…Additionally, some walls were intentionally not sealed to represent leaky walls in order to cover a wide range of air leakage rate at different pressure difference across the walls. A brief outline of the WER project objectives and a limited set of results of two walls were presented in an earlier paper [10] and test results of six walls were presented in a subsequent paper [11]. Two of these walls were intentionally constructed with some deficiencies to represent leaky walls for the purpose of development the WER procedure.…”

“…Four of the six walls were insulated using light density open cell SPF (6.8 and 12 kg/m 3 ). The remaining two walls were reference walls (WER-1 and WER-5, [11]). …”