Balancing of thermal and acoustic insulation performances in building envelope design

nergy consumption of buildings depends basically on the criteria used for design and operation. Therefore, thermal insulation of building structures is a topic of fundamental importance in building’s design. Moreover, the acoustic protection of internal environment is often considered less important or feasible in a subsequent design time, as a consequence of thermal issue. The main problem concerning acoustic and thermal performances of building elements is that it can be hard to optimize both performances in the same time because of the different physics phenomena related to these two aspects. In this work several aspects of acoustic and thermal design are evaluated, with the aim of balancing overall performances. A comparative analysis was performed to evaluate the interaction between several approaches to building design. Different types of insulating materials and construction techniques have been used in the same case study and possible correlations between thermal and acoustic performances have been evaluated. Results show that thermal and acoustic design optimization have to take into account field transient conditions as well as structural joints, because the simple comparison between physical properties of heat and sound transmission of building materials in steady state conditions is not sufficient for establish clear correlatio