DA-88-08-2 -- Diagnostic Techniques for Evaluating Office Building Envelopes PDF

A variety of diagnostic procedures exists for evaluating the thermal performance of office building envelopes. These measurement techniques enable the quantification of various aspects of envelope thermal performance including airtightness, thermal resistance, and insulation system performance. This paper describes several of these diagnostic measurement techniques in terms of instrumentation, test procedures, and data analysis. Representative measurement results are also presented for each technique. The techniques that are described include tracer gas measurements of air exchange rates, pressurization testing of whole building and component airtightness, thermal resistance measurements with calorimeter boxes and heat flux transducers, and infrared thermographic inspection.

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