A New Method of Pixel-Level In Situ U-Value Measurement for Building Envelopes Based on Infrared Thermography
Publication: Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
ABSTRACT
The potential energy loss of aging buildings traps building owners in a cycle of underfunding operations and overpaying maintenance costs. Energy auditors intending to generate an energy model of a target building for performance assessment may struggle to obtain accurate results as the spatial distribution of temperatures is not considered when calculating the U-value of the building envelope. This paper proposes a pixel-level method based on infrared thermography (IRT) that considers two-dimensional (2D) spatial temperature distributions of the outdoor and indoor surfaces of the target wall to generate a 2D U-value map of the wall. The result supports that the proposed method can better reflect the actual thermal insulation performance of the target wall compared to the current IRT-based methods that use a single-point room temperature as input.
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Published online: Jan 25, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Architectural engineering
- Building envelope
- Building management
- Building systems
- Buildings
- Computer vision and image processing
- Distribution functions
- Engineering fundamentals
- Engineering mechanics
- Maintenance and operation
- Mathematical functions
- Mathematics
- Methodology (by type)
- Spatial distribution
- Structural engineering
- Structural members
- Structural systems
- Structures (by type)
- Temperature (by type)
- Temperature distribution
- Thermal effects
- Thermal properties
- Thermodynamics
- Walls
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