Thermal performance of an insulated roof with reflective insulation: Field tests under hot climatic conditions

Abstract

The use of reflective insulation materials in buildings, for energy saving in summer, has been spreading in southern Europe. These products are not typical of the local building context. There is a lack of well-established measurement systems for reflective insulation thermal transmittance. The aim of this article is to understand whether a reflective insulation material could be effective in hot and temperate climate, also compared with other roof solutions. For this purpose, we compared the thermal performance of a roof with and without reflective insulation, both installed in a full-scale experimental building near Ancona (Italy) in the summer period. The results showed that the reflective insulation benefits are quite limited when using the insulation level imposed by actual laws, which consider insulation as the main strategy for energy saving in temperate and hot climates.

Development of the engineering procedure for the thermotechnical calculation of a building envelope with air chambers and a heat­reflecting coating

“…Numerous studies have been devoted to the problem of energy conservation in building engineering. For example, energy-saving issues of heating the buildings are discussed in [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. One of the main ways to reduce heat losses in heating the buildings implies raising RSI-value of building envelope.…”

“…However, the use of polyethylene in such structures can result in a violation of air exchange and condensate formation. The feasibility of applying heat-reflecting coatings was considered in [2]. At the same time, it is noted that the effectiveness of such coatings largely depends on climatic conditions.…”

Economic justification of the choice of the thermal protection of buildings

“…The economic aspect of choosing the thermal protection level of the buildings is under a close attention of specialists [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Moreover, the economic feasibility of the further increase in the thermal protection level is often questioned [12,13].…”

Hygrothermal Dynamic and Mould Growth Risk Predictions for Concrete Tiles by Using Least Squares Support Vector Machines

“…In this context, reflective roof or insulation coatings have been utilized for increasing the energy savings potential of building envelopes, and several studies can be found in the literature, such as [18,19,[23][24][25][26][27]. Nevertheless, due to the low cost, concrete or ceramic tiles are widely used in roofs in Brazil.…”