Innovative thermal insulation panels with air channels

The research has been carried out in the direction of developing a new design of building materials with improved thermal insulation properties, by applying different geometries of air channels inside the materials, increasing thus porosity and lowering the density. The solution that was proposed consisted in perforating extruded polystyrene (XPS) panels. Perforation was performed horizontally and at an angle of 45 degrees. The method is simple and cost-effective. Perforated and simple XPS panels were subjected to three different temperature regimes. There was an increase in thermal conductivity with the increase in average temperature in all studied cases. The presence of air channels reduced the thermal conductivity of the perforated panels. The reduction was more significant at the panels with inclined channels. The differences between the thermal conductivity of simple XPS and perforated XPS panels are small, but the latter can be improved by increasing the number of orifices and lowering the air channels diameter. Also, the higher the thermal conductivity of the base material, the more significant is the presence of the channels, reducing the effective thermal conductivity. A base material with low emissivity may also reduce the thermal conductivity.