THERMAL INSULATION PERFORMANCE OF WALL STRUCTURES MADE OF RECYCLED MATERIALS.

One of the most important actions to reduce the energy consumption in a building is to use the thermal insulation materials. These are used to prevent the transfer of heat and they should have the lowest thermal conductivity. Traditional insulation materials include mineral wool, glass fiber, polystyrene, and polyurethane foams. They are efficient but, they are made from non-renewable resource, and some of them are based on chemicals which can deteriorate the indoor air quality. The paper aims to evaluate the thermal performance of different insulation structures of wall made of recyclable materials. The insulation structures include a core made of sheep wool and cardboard tubes and faces based on particleboard and oriented strand board. Other insulation structures included white expanded polystyrene as core being considered reference to compare the thermal insulation performance. The insulation structure with sheep wool registered the lowest coefficient of thermal conductivity (0.051 W/mK) comparable with that of the reference structures. The corrugated tubes didn't ensure thermal insulation, the values of the thermal conductivity coefficient being over 0.16 W/mK. The best thermal insulation performance of structure with sheep wool was also demonstrated by other parameters like thermal resistance and thermal transmittance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]