Hot Box Investigations and Theoretical Assessments of Miscellaneous Vacuum Insulation Panel Configurations in Building Envelopes

Vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) are regarded as one of the most promising existing high performance thermal insulation solutions on the market today as their thermal performance typically range 5—10 times better than traditional insulation materials. However, the VIPs have several disadvantages such as risk of puncturing by penetration of nails and that they cannot be cut or fitted at the construction site. Furthermore, thermal bridging due to the panel envelope and load-bearing elements may have a large effect on the overall thermal performance. Finally, degradation of thermal performance due to moisture and air diffusion through the panel envelope is also a crucial issue for VIPs. In this work, laboratory investigations have been carried out by hot box measurements. These experimental results have been compared with numerical simulations of several wall structure arrangements of vacuum insulation panels. Various VIP edge and overlap effects have been studied. Measured U-values from hot box VIP large-scale experiments correspond well with numerical calculated U-values when actual values of the various parameters are used as input values in the numerical simulations.© The Author(s) 2010. Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article