Impact of the insulation materials’ features on the determination of optimum insulation thickness

Abstract

The optimum thickness of the building envelope insulation materials depends on a large number of parameters. But the optimum thickness is calculated considering only economic arguments. In this paper, life-cycle assessment of the materials used in the building, and specifically the insulation ones, are included in the process to calculate the optimum insulation thickness from both environmental and energetic points of views. Within this frame, the large influence of the parameters associated with the manufacturing of the materials on the determination of the optimum thickness has been demonstrated: For all the studied cases, the insulation thickness depends in a large way on the unitary economic, energetic and environmental costs. The biggest differences in optimum thicknesses between two different insulation materials correspond to the highest differences in the unitary costs, for all the optimization points of views. The study also demonstrates that increasing values of the characteristic parameters of the manufacturing phase, which depend on the nature of the insulation materials, imply a decrease of the impact of the calculation settings, associated with the use phase of the building.