An integrated study on the integration of VIPs in ultra-low energy consumption concrete prefabricated buildings

Description of the project: The Chinese government is encouraging the development of environmental friendly ultra-low-energy-consumption buildings. This study looked at applying VIP in precasted-walls for prefabricated buildings with decorative surface layer. In the past, the ‘sandwich-structure’ insulation methods are mainly adopted by the construction of prefabricated buildings, with expanded polystyrene (EPS), extruded polystyrene foam (XPS) etc. as insulation layers. By applying the VIP-integrated-precasted-walls (prefabricated external insulation), several problems were tackled, including reducing the thickness of the enclosure wall, avoiding the cold-bridge generated by the connection of inner and outer walls and also lowering the fire risks.
The study has a twofold objective:

• To explore the different methods for application of VIPs in ultra-low-energy-consumption prefabricated buildings.
• To achieve an average heat transfer coefficient of 0.15 W/(m2·K) of the integrated-precasted-walls with decorative surface layer, to fulfill the requirements for the enclosure walls of the ultra-low-energy-consumption buildings.