Lecture

Building Technology: Envelope

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Description

This lecture covers the importance of building envelope in construction, focusing on thermal insulation, facade types, and construction details. It discusses the benefits of insulation, constraints in different building elements, and comparison between interior and exterior insulation. The instructor presents exercises related to building elements and envelope design.

This video is available exclusively on Mediaspace for a restricted audience. Please log in to MediaSpace to access it if you have the necessary permissions.

Watch on Mediaspace

Official source

Related concepts (12)

Building insulation

Building insulation is material used in a building (specifically the building envelope) to reduce the flow of thermal energy. While the majority of insulation in buildings is for thermal purposes, the term also applies to acoustic insulation, fire insulation, and impact insulation (e.g. for vibrations caused by industrial applications). Often an insulation material will be chosen for its ability to perform several of these functions at once. Insulation is an important economic and environmental investment for buildings.

Building envelope

A building envelope is the physical separator between the conditioned and unconditioned environment of a building including the resistance to air, water, heat, light, and noise transfer. The building envelope (or the more modern term, building enclosure) is all of the elements of the outer shell that maintain a dry, heated, or cooled indoor environment and facilitate its climate control. Building envelope design is a specialized area of architectural and engineering practice that draws from all areas of building science and indoor climate control.

Thermal insulation

Thermal insulation is the reduction of heat transfer (i.e., the transfer of thermal energy between objects of differing temperature) between objects in thermal contact or in range of radiative influence. Thermal insulation can be achieved with specially engineered methods or processes, as well as with suitable object shapes and materials. Heat flow is an inevitable consequence of contact between objects of different temperature.

Building science

Building science is the science and technology-driven collection of knowledge in order to provide better indoor environmental quality (IEQ), energy-efficient built environments, and occupant comfort and satisfaction. Building physics, architectural science, and applied physics are terms used for the knowledge domain that overlaps with building science. In building science, the methods used in natural and hard sciences are widely applied, which may include controlled and quasi-experiments, randomized control, physical measurements, remote sensing, and simulations.

Building performance

Building performance is an attribute of a building that expresses how well that building carries out its functions. It may also relate to the performance of the building construction process. Categories of building performance are quality (how well the building fulfills its functions), resource savings (how much of a particular resource is needed to fulfill its functions) and workload capacity (how much the building can do). The performance of a building depends on the response of the building to an external load or shock.

Related lectures (47)

Structural Evolution MOOC: Advanced Timber Plate Structural Design

Delves into a new generation of structures where traditional separations disappear, integrating mechanical optimization processes and emphasizing the role of structural engineers.

Bioclimatic Building Technologies

Explores the analysis of building materials and energy balance in bioclimatic architecture using Dial+ software.

Environmental System Analysis and Assessment

Covers the organization and objectives of an exercise session using SimaPro for environmental system analysis and assessment.

Indoor Climate: Fundamentals & Implications

Covers the basics of indoor climate, emphasizing its impact on health, productivity, and sustainability.

Building Envelope and Energy Production