Europe has about 75% of energy inefficient buildings and 8% of population with difficulties affording energy bills for keeping adequate levels of thermal comfort in residential existing buildings. The thermal insulation of existing buildings would allow to meet the requirements to solve both issues and to align with the Near Zero Emission Scenario. As the choice of the most suitable thermal insulation material should consider an ensemble of requirements, this research proposes an approach to describe thermal insulation materials performance accordingly to four objective macro-areas, framed in Technical (T), Environmental (En), Social (S) and Economic (E) topics, namely called TEnSE approach. Thermal insulation materials commonly used in Italy, Norway, and Portugal were compared within an ensemble of ad-hoc selected TEnSE parameters to understand which macro-area would mostly affect their choice among several stakeholders (e.g., Technician, Environmentalist, Safety expert, Economist). The stakeholder’ score (StS) was defined as the product of the normalised parameter in TEnSE framework extracted from the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and the importance given to it by each unspecified stakeholder. None of the selected materials reaches the highest score, so their implementation might be predominantly driven by the availability of raw material and its workability on site. Although other parameters could be considered in the TEnSE ensemble for further analysis, this approach has shown high potentiality in the performance assessment of thermal insulation materials and can be extended to other fields of application.
The TEnSE approach to quantitatively compare thermal insulation materials among stakeholders
Ogut O.;
2023-01-01
Abstract
Europe has about 75% of energy inefficient buildings and 8% of population with difficulties affording energy bills for keeping adequate levels of thermal comfort in residential existing buildings. The thermal insulation of existing buildings would allow to meet the requirements to solve both issues and to align with the Near Zero Emission Scenario. As the choice of the most suitable thermal insulation material should consider an ensemble of requirements, this research proposes an approach to describe thermal insulation materials performance accordingly to four objective macro-areas, framed in Technical (T), Environmental (En), Social (S) and Economic (E) topics, namely called TEnSE approach. Thermal insulation materials commonly used in Italy, Norway, and Portugal were compared within an ensemble of ad-hoc selected TEnSE parameters to understand which macro-area would mostly affect their choice among several stakeholders (e.g., Technician, Environmentalist, Safety expert, Economist). The stakeholder’ score (StS) was defined as the product of the normalised parameter in TEnSE framework extracted from the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and the importance given to it by each unspecified stakeholder. None of the selected materials reaches the highest score, so their implementation might be predominantly driven by the availability of raw material and its workability on site. Although other parameters could be considered in the TEnSE ensemble for further analysis, this approach has shown high potentiality in the performance assessment of thermal insulation materials and can be extended to other fields of application.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
