Insulation industry news from Global Insulation

US: Rhino Linings Corporation has acquired the assets of Expo Industries Inc, a San Diego-based manufacturer of Expo Stucco™ interior and exterior stucco products, sealers, bonders, patch products and plaster mixes.

The acquisition expands Rhino Linings line of building products, which already include waterproofing products, spray polyurethane foam insulation, decorative concrete and epoxy flooring systems.

"Expo Stucco is a well-respected and recognised leader in the building industry," said Pierre Gagnon, president and CEO of Rhino Linings Corporation. "Since Expo Stucco blended and packaged our Concrete Solutions bag mixes, we are now able to bring product packaging in-house and expand our line of building products. We are also excited about the opportunity to expand name recognition and sales for the Expo Stucco brand."

Russia: Finish insulation producer Paroc is preparing to open an insulation plant in Tver in December 2013. The plant will primarily produce materials for the Russian market but technical insulation materials will also be exported to European Union members, according to Russian media.

"The demand for insulation is likely to increase in Russia. The growth here has been even more rapid than in Europe," said Kari Lehtinen, CEO of Paroc Group. "Our share of the Russian market is about 2%. After launching production at full capacity, we are planning to control 7 to 8% of the Russian market."

The new plant's location was chosen because of the railway links between Tver, near Moscow, and St Petersburg. Once opened, Paroc's new plant will be the third Finnish plant in the Tverskaya Oblast region of Russia. Paroc purchased the former mineral wool plant in late 2011 and has rebuilt around 90% of the production machinery. Currently 150 workers are employed by the plant and Paroc plans to increase that number to 400 by 2015 and to 600 when development of the site is complete.

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.