Week 6 Internship Log: Envelope Thermal Performance Assessment
This week, I transitioned from the school building ESD improvement project to a new project tackling preliminary thermal performance assessment for an aquatic centre. The previous project was a valuable learning opportunity, as it allowed me to develop skills in navigating Better Building, and one of the skills that I utilised in the last project, carries over to this new one.
The new project aims to provide the architect with early-stage information on whether the proposed building envelope design, including the floor, external walls, and roof is likely to meet minimum thermal compliance requirements. The outcome will help identify potential performance issues early in the design process.
A key area of investigation in this project was the utilisation of thermal break strips and its best practice installation location. I reviewed how thermal bridging through structural elements can reduce the effective thermal resistance of walls and roof assemblies using the thermal analysis tools in Better Building, the result clearly shows that thermal bridging can lower the overall R-value even where bulk insulation has been planned. Thus, installing a thermal break can interrupt this heat conduction path and improve the effective R-value of the assembly by great margin. In the end I identified 8 distinct envelope assembly and ran assessment for each of them.
I also had the experience to fiddle with Better Building’s HAMT (heat and moisture transfer) solver, this analysis tool was used to inform us the mould growth index over the envelope’s life service, again, something new I learned in this internship placement. However, I still need extensive research to better understand how realistic my input parameter and how to derive meaningful insights from the results. So going forward, I will look deeper into the ASHRAE 160/AIRAH DA07 technical guidebook to deliver better analysis and technical recommendations for the architects next week, and hopefully, write some interesting insights based on my user experience on this solver. Stay tuned everyone, cheers.