Chapter
Jan 25, 2024

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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Go to Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Pages: 697 - 704

History

Published online: Jan 25, 2024

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1Sonny Astani Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Email: [email protected]
Yu Hou, Ph.D. [email protected]
2Assistant Professor, Dept. of Construction Management, Western New England Univ., Springfield, MA. Email: [email protected]
Lucio Soibelman, Ph.D., Dist.M.ASCE [email protected]
3Professor, Sonny Astani Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Email: [email protected]

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