Thermal Bridge Mitigation in Army Buildings (OR-16-024)

High performance buildings are becoming more prevalent in new Army construction projects. Unfortunately, these new designs often do not take into account preventive procedures to avoid thermal bridging effects which are localized heat flow between the building interior and exterior. These effects become much more significant as buildings are designed to be highly insulated and better sealed against air leakage. Researchers from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center - Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) visited several Army installations and used infra-red imaging to survey buildings to identify places in the building envelope where thermal bridging commonly occur. Characteristic construction sections were selected for heat transfer modeling to quantify the thermal bridging impact and develop general mitigation solutions. This manuscript presents examples of the developed U.S. Army ERDC-CERL Thermal Bridge Mitigation Catalog, which includes architectural details thermal bridge modeling values (ψ and U-factors), and schematics of good construction practices to improve the building envelope performance of typical Army facilities. In addition, this work includes developed visual step-by-step sequencing examples to be used by the construction practitioner for the assembly of a properly mitigated thermal bridge detail in the building envelope.