Vacuum Insulation Panel: Evaluation of Declared Thermal Conductivity Value and Implications for Building Energy

Abstract

Policymakers regularly implement stricter building energy-efficiency codes towards curtailing building energy use. Inevitably, super-insulating materials such as Vacuum Insulation Panels (VIPs) are essential to satisfy such codes. VIPs have been applied to buildings for over two decades now, with many lessons learned. Generally, the thermal conductivity values of VIPs often reported in the literature are the center-of-panel thermal conductivity (λcop) and effective thermal conductivity (λeff), factoring thermal bridges. However, there are other indexes, such as λ90/90 (declared value in the 90% percentile with a confidence of 90%) and λcop,90/90,aged (factoring aging), that increase consistently and reliably in the declared thermal conductivity value for VIPs. These indexes are scarcely computed and hardly reported. The main aim of this study was to examine the different declared thermal conductivity values of VIP-based guidelines, such as draft ISO DIS 16478, and evaluate their implications on annual building energy consumption. The main study constitutes four parts: (1) experimental evaluation of the thermal properties of pristine and aged VIP samples, (2) computation of thermal conductivity indexes, (3) numerical investigation of thermal conductivity indexes based on a reference building, and (4) related building energy implications. The mean λcop for 10 VIP samples was 0.0042 W/(mK) and increased to 0.0073 W/(mK) for λ90/90, bridge, aged. Results show a significant bearing on building energy performance of as much as 2.1 GJ.