Thermal Bridge Issues in Commercial Buildings

Thermal bridges occur in every building, as it is impossible to avoid them entirely, but they can be significantly limited and their impact reduced to a minimum. According to the cause of their formation, thermal bridges are divided into geometric, convective, constructional, and combined types. These types and forms of thermal bridges most commonly occur in practice at locations such as balconies, windows, doors, ceiling walls, roofs, façade corners, and at improperly executed details and joints. Each detail was drawn without insulation and with it, and the results of thermal transmittance at a specific point of the detail were compared with each other.

Problem

Thermal bridges occur in every building, as it is impossible to avoid them entirely, but they can be significantly limited and their impact reduced to a minimum. According to the cause of their formation, thermal bridges are divided into geometric, convective, constructional, and combined types. They are also divided according to their form, namely into point and linear thermal bridges.

Solution and Method

These types and forms of thermal bridges most commonly occur in practice at locations such as balconies, windows, doors, ceiling walls, roofs, façade corners, and at improperly executed details and joints. In the introduction, they set objectives and hypotheses and confirmed or rejected them at the end of the diploma thesis. In the theoretical part of the diploma thesis, they initially described the joint collaboration of students in the project group, which took place at the headquarters of Academia Institute of Technology in Maribor.

In the continuation, they described in more detail the types of formation and forms of thermal bridges, and then focused on the topic of thermal protection of buildings, the consequences of thermal bridges, and their remediation. Thermal protection of buildings acts as a shield for the building, protecting it from adverse weather conditions and keeping our building energy efficient. In this section, several types of thermal insulation and waterproofing are described.

Regarding the consequences of thermal bridges, it is described what problems arise when thermal bridges occur, which adversely affect both the building structure and human health and well-being. If the listed problems occur, the remediation of thermal bridges described in the continuation is necessary – remediation requires major construction intervention, which can cause significant costs. At the end of the theoretical part, the planning of construction without thermal bridges is described, namely how the designer must approach the planning of construction itself so that problems and unnecessary remediation do not occur later.

Thermal protection must be planned without interruption and with appropriate thickness, as thermal bridges occur precisely at these locations. In the practical part, they described the presented building for which they set hypotheses and objectives and described the thermal bridge issues. They selected five details and stated how they were executed, which type of insulation was used, described the characteristics of the installed materials, and attached photographs of the insulation installation.

In the Htflux programme, they drew the construction for each individual detail and entered the materials used.

Results

Each detail was drawn without insulation and with it, and the results of thermal transmittance at a specific point of the detail were compared with each other.