Analysis of the coupled effect of steel studs and surface emissivity on internal insulation systems performance

Many kinds of insulation systems have been developed and applied over the years to all the constructive elements of the building, but the two most used strategies remain the external and internal insulation of vertical walls. However, about the latter often a significant issue is neglected: the overestimation of the thermal performance by disregarding the contribution of construction elements. Usually a uniform stratigraphy of the wall is considered and the evaluation of the performance of a non-uniform one leads to erroneous results about the overall behavior of the system. In this paper, we developed a different approach considering the presence of the steel studs used to attach this package to the existing wall and their influence on the thermal behavior of the structure. Through both experimental and numerical analysis, the possible application of low-e sheets inside the air cavity in various configurations and with different thicknesses of insulation is also taken into account. Results showed that neglecting the presence of the steel studs leads to an erroneous evaluation of the conductance of the refurbished wall with errors reaching up to 28.0% in low-e high-insulated cases. This work highlights how careful the designers have to be when using standard formulas to compute the thermal resistance of internal insulation wall systems.