Insulation industry news from Global Insulation

UK: Superglass Holdings reported that its revenue fell by 25% year-on-year to Euro29m in its financial year that ended on 31 August 2013. In the UK-based mineral wool producer's preliminary results statement, chief executive Alex McLeod conceded that the company had faced 'extremely challenging trading conditions'.

"The transition from CERT to ECO/Green Deal has caused a major gap in activity within the retrofit market for both loft and cavity insulation. Combined with abnormally low levels of house-building activity in the UK by historical standards of new unit construction despite recent early signs of recovery, the net effect has been a surplus of UK-based insulation manufacturing capacity and highly competitive market conditions," said McLeod. In Superglass' fiscal 2013 its operating loss grew to Euro13.2m from Euro2.98m in the fiscal 2012.

Both McLeod and chairman John Colley highlighted Superglass' capital investment programme, Project Phoenix, which delivered cost savings in reduced energy consumption and waste of Euro3.36m in the 2012 – 2013 financial year. Superglass expects revenues to recover slowly in 2014.

US: The Building Science Corporation (BSC) has released a report detailing the results of a multi-year insulation research project. The most significant finding from the report is that sealed walls of the same R-value perform equally well regardless of the type of insulation used.

The study entailed a baseline set of seven test walls using various insulation types including fibreglass, cellulose, spray foam and extruded polystyrene.

Other selected highlights from the report include:

• When walls are constructed with the same installed R-value in the stud space and are air sealed both inside and outside, they exhibit essentially the same thermal performance regardless of the type of insulation material used.
• All of the reference test wall assemblies were subjected to significant temperature differences. Natural convective looping was not noted in any of the wall assemblies.
• Conventional energy models may over-predict the negative energy impact on walls that have a significant interaction effect (e.g. air moving through insulation).
• All wall assemblies experienced a loss in thermal performance due to air movement through the assembly. This is true for all of the assemblies tested, regardless of the type of insulation material used (e.g. cellulose, fiber glass, open cell spray foam, closed cell spray foam or extruded polystyrene.)
• Commercially available 2D and 3D heat transfer models provided good predictions of thermal bridging in the assemblies tested, as did the parallel path method described in the ASHRAE Handbook of Fundamentals and other texts.

US: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM) will test integrated multi-layer insulation (IMLI) in 2015. Quest Thermal Group LLC will manufacture the insulation under a subcontract from Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. Quest is developing the technology under small business innovative research (SBIR) contracts to NASA.

"Conventional insulation was necessary for the GPIM spacecraft, and now we can fly a section of the IMLI at no extra cost to the program and prove it for operational use," said Jim Oschmann, vice president and general manager for Ball's Civil Space and Technology business unit.

GPIM is a project for NASA's Technology Mission Demonstration (TDM) program managed by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). The primary purpose of the mission is to demonstrate the viability of an alternative propulsion system for spacecraft other than hydrazine by flying a 'green' propulsion system.

US: Owens Corning has completed the construction of a 2.7MW solar power plant for its thermal and acoustical insulation facility in Delmar, New York. Constellation Energy, part of Exelon Corp, funded, constructed and will operate the solar facility. The project was developed under the NY-Sun initiative, which is being administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Owens Corning will buy the power generated by the plant under a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Constellation. The facility consists of 9000 ground-mounted panels and is expected to produce about 3.3BWh/yr of power, offsetting about 2339t of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. It will cover over 6% of the electricity requirements of Owens Corning's insulation facility.

US: Californian governor Jerry Brown has signed into law bill AB 127 that directs the California State Fire Marshal to consider fire safety without the use of toxic flame retardant chemicals, now commonly used in building insulation. The bill does not ban the use of chemicals such as a Hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) but it does encourage a reduction in their use.

The Californian State Fire Marshal, in consultation with the Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair, Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation will review the flammability standards for building insulation materials. The State Fire Marshal may propose, by 1 July 2015, for consideration by the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, updated insulation flammability standards whose objectives include maintaining overall building fire safety.