scholarly journals Investigation of Heat Transfer for the Wall between Polyurethane Foam and Polystyrene

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  

In construction, polyurethanes are used to make high-performance products that are strong yet lightweight, perform well, durable and versatile. Polyurethane products can also help improve the aesthetic design of homes and buildings. Polyurethane is a key ingredient in several types of high-performance insulation materials, sealants and adhesives used in home and building construction. Here I will show the difference between using polyurethane foam and polystyrene using the example of a 1.5 m high wall and different widths depending on the thickness of the polyurethane.

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 428-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dileep Kumar ◽  
Patrick X.W. Zou ◽  
Rizwan Ahmed Memon ◽  
MD Morshed Alam ◽  
Jay G Sanjayan ◽  
...  

Heat transfer through building opaque envelope is responsible for approximately half of the total heat loss and gain to and from the surroundings. Therefore, insulation materials are commonly used in the building envelope to reduce the heat transfer. Recently, lightweight wall materials with lower thermal conductivity are used in construction along with the commonly used materials such as heavy concrete and earthen materials. In this perspective, there is a need to understand the optimum insulation thickness for different types of building construction materials to minimize unnecessary usage of insulation materials. This study investigated the optimum insulation thickness for different construction materials following a life-cycle approach, where an analytical optimization methodology based on the degree-days method and life-cycle cost analysis was used. In total, 4 insulation materials and 15 building construction materials were considered in the optimization study. The objective function was to minimize life-cycle cost corresponding to the decision variables including insulation thickness and the thermal conductivity of insulation and wall materials. The results showed that the use of insulation in lightweight wall materials is not economically feasible because of their negligible cost-saving potential (below US$2.5/m2-year). However, the walls with heavy concrete and earthen materials that have high thermal mass must be insulated due to their highest cost-saving potential (US$14–26.39/m2-year).


Nanomaterials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 934 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao-Chen Zhang ◽  
Xin-Lin Xia ◽  
Dong-Hui Li ◽  
Chuang Sun

With the developments in high-performance nano-insulation material technology, theoretical studies on the heat transfer mechanisms in these materials have been conducted. However, the conductivity of nanometer-sized skeletons is still unclear. It is necessary to clarify the thermal conductivity of nanometer-sized solid skeletons in order to better understand the heat transfer mechanisms in nano-insulation materials. In the present study, a theoretical model for the thermal conductivity of nanometer-sized skeletons in nano-insulation materials is presented based upon the meso-structure of the material and the equation of phonon transfer. The size effect in thermal conductivity of the nanometer-sized particles is studied numerically, and the thermal conductivity is theoretically obtained. At the same time, a reverse method is established for the thermal conductivity of nanometer-sized particles based on the method of particle swarm optimization (PSO). The skeleton thermal conductivity for a specific nano-insulation material with a density of 110 kg/m3 and porosity of 0.94 is identified based upon experimental data from literature. Comparison results show that the theoretical conductivity of nanometer-sized skeletons and the identified results give the values of 0.145 and 0.124 W/(m K), respectively, clearly revealing obvious an size effect in the thermal conductivity of nanometer-sized skeletons.


Materials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 3348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuangxi Zhou ◽  
Yang Ding ◽  
Zhongping Wang ◽  
Jingliang Dong ◽  
Anming She ◽  
...  

Rigid polyurethane foam, foam concrete, and vacuum insulation board are common roofing insulation materials. Their weathering performance under long-term multi-field coupling determines the overall service life of the roof. The weathering properties of rigid polyurethane foam, foam concrete and vacuum insulation panels were studied under freeze thaw, humid-heat, dry-wet, high-low temperature, and multi-field coupling cycles, respectively. The heat transfer and construction process of roof panels was simulated base on upper loading and moisture transfer factors. The result indicates that the mass loss of the foam concrete and the rigid polyurethane foam in the weathering test was significant, which led to the gradual increase of thermal conductivity. Meanwhile, the thermal conductivity and mass loss of vacuum insulation panels did not change due to the lack of penetration under external pressure, therefore, it is necessary to construct composite thermal–insulation materials to alleviate the adverse effects of the service environment on a single material and realize the complementary advantages and disadvantages of the two materials. The results of the numerical simulations indicated that the roof structure must be waterproofed, and its weatherproof performance index should be the same as that of the thermal insulation material. Considering structural deformation, the overall heat transfer performance of the product was increased by around 5%.


Author(s):  
Keith N. Atkinson ◽  
Radenko Drakulic ◽  
Morgan R. Heikal ◽  
Christopher A. McNab

Author(s):  
Peter Rez

Most of the energy used by buildings goes into heating and cooling. For small buildings, such as houses, heat transfer by conduction through the sides is as much as, if not greater than, the heat transfer from air exchanges with the outside. For large buildings, such as offices and factories, the greater volume-to-surface ratio means that air exchanges are more significant. Lights, people and equipment can make significant contributions. Since the energy used depends on the difference in temperature between the inside and the outside, local climate is the most important factor that determines energy use. If heating is required, it is usually more efficient to use a heat pump than to directly burn a fossil fuel. Using diffuse daylight is always more energy efficient than lighting up a room with artificial lights, although this will set a limit on the size of buildings.


Author(s):  
Mohanapriya Venkataraman ◽  
Rajesh Mishra ◽  
Jiri Militky ◽  
Dana Kremenakova ◽  
Petru Michal

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 3298
Author(s):  
Gianpiero Colangelo ◽  
Brenda Raho ◽  
Marco Milanese ◽  
Arturo de Risi

Nanofluids have great potential to improve the heat transfer properties of liquids, as demonstrated by recent studies. This paper presents a novel idea of utilizing nanofluid. It analyzes the performance of a HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) system using a high-performance heat transfer fluid (water-glycol nanofluid with nanoparticles of Al2O3), in the university campus of Lecce, Italy. The work describes the dynamic model of the building and its heating and cooling system, realized through the simulation software TRNSYS 17. The use of heat transfer fluid inseminated by nanoparticles in a real HVAC system is an innovative application that is difficult to find in the scientific literature so far. This work focuses on comparing the efficiency of the system working with a traditional water-glycol mixture with the same system that uses Al2O3-nanofluid. The results obtained by means of the dynamic simulations have confirmed what theoretically assumed, indicating the working conditions of the HVAC system that lead to lower operating costs and higher COP and EER, guaranteeing the optimal conditions of thermo-hygrometric comfort inside the building. Finally, the results showed that the use of a nanofluid based on water-glycol mixture and alumina increases the efficiency about 10% and at the same time reduces the electrical energy consumption of the HVAC system.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (13) ◽  
pp. 3955
Author(s):  
Yonghan Ahn ◽  
Hanbyeol Jang ◽  
Junghyon Mun

The purpose of this study is to compare the load calculation results by a model using the air changes per hour (ACH) method and a model using an airflow network (AFN) and to ascertain what causes the difference between the two models. In the basic case study, the difference in the heat transfer distribution of the model in the interior space was investigated. The most significant difference between the two models is the heat transfer that results from infiltration. Parameter analysis was performed to investigate the relationship between the difference and the environmental variables. The result shows that the greater the difference is between the air temperature inside the balcony and the outdoor air temperature, and the greater the air flows from the balcony to the residential area, and the greater the heating and cooling load difference occurs. The analysis using the actual weather files of five domestic cities in South Korea rather than a virtual case shows that the differences are not so obvious when the wind blows at a constant speed throughout the year, but are dominant when the wind does not blow during the night and is stronger alongside the occurrence of sunlight during the day.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 2455
Author(s):  
Jiayuan He ◽  
Weizhen Chen ◽  
Boshan Zhang ◽  
Jiangjiang Yu ◽  
Hang Liu

Due to the sharp and corrosion-prone features of steel fibers, there is a demand for ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) reinforced with nonmetallic fibers. In this paper, glass fiber (GF) and the high-performance polypropylene (HPP) fiber were selected to prepare UHPC, and the effects of different fibers on the compressive, tensile and bending properties of UHPC were investigated, experimentally and numerically. Then, the damage evolution of UHPC was further studied numerically, adopting the concrete damaged plasticity (CDP) model. The difference between the simulation values and experimental values was within 5.0%, verifying the reliability of the numerical model. The results indicate that 2.0% fiber content in UHPC provides better mechanical properties. In addition, the glass fiber was more significant in strengthening the effect. Compared with HPP-UHPC, the compressive, tensile and flexural strength of GF-UHPC increased by about 20%, 30% and 40%, respectively. However, the flexural toughness indexes I5, I10 and I20 of HPP-UHPC were about 1.2, 2.0 and 3.8 times those of GF-UHPC, respectively, showing that the toughening effect of the HPP fiber is better.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 627
Author(s):  
David Marquez-Viloria ◽  
Luis Castano-Londono ◽  
Neil Guerrero-Gonzalez

A methodology for scalable and concurrent real-time implementation of highly recurrent algorithms is presented and experimentally validated using the AWS-FPGA. This paper presents a parallel implementation of a KNN algorithm focused on the m-QAM demodulators using high-level synthesis for fast prototyping, parameterization, and scalability of the design. The proposed design shows the successful implementation of the KNN algorithm for interchannel interference mitigation in a 3 × 16 Gbaud 16-QAM Nyquist WDM system. Additionally, we present a modified version of the KNN algorithm in which comparisons among data symbols are reduced by identifying the closest neighbor using the rule of the 8-connected clusters used for image processing. Real-time implementation of the modified KNN on a Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ VU9P AWS-FPGA board was compared with the results obtained in previous work using the same data from the same experimental setup but offline DSP using Matlab. The results show that the difference is negligible below FEC limit. Additionally, the modified KNN shows a reduction of operations from 43 percent to 75 percent, depending on the symbol’s position in the constellation, achieving a reduction 47.25% reduction in total computational time for 100 K input symbols processed on 20 parallel cores compared to the KNN algorithm.


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