By Rick Gardner
The RCI-IIBEC Foundation recently met with representatives from the Charles Pankow Foundation and approved financial support for the next phase of research on spandrel systems that includes up to seven types of systems being evaluated.
“The Pankow Foundation is very happy with the work being done as well as the community buy-in,” said Stuart Harrison, executive director of the Pankow Foundation. “Spandrel systems have a poor performance from an energy perspective, and this research will help lead us to more energy efficiency.”
According to Stéphane P. Hoffman, PE, with Morrison Hershfield, one of the principal researchers on this project, “The research we are doing will create a very robust data set that has not existed before. It will close our knowledge gap and allow us to create methodologies to model these assemblies and suggest possible remediation methods for our industry and IIBEC members. Supplementing the measurements with 2D/3D thermal simulations will enable the development of procedures that can be universally applied, developed into standards, and adopted by codes.”
Testing is being performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and thermal modeling will be performed by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Engineering Team of RDH, Morrison Hershfield, and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc. Embodied carbon, through Life Cycle Analysis, will also be evaluated by the research team.
This phase of the research is expected to be completed by September 2025.
Several of the researchers will be presenting results from the earlier phases at the 2024 IIBEC/OBEC BES in Toronto. The presentation, Thermal Performance of Spandrel Assemblies in Glazed Wall Systems, includes presenters Ivan Lee, PEng, Daniel Haaland, MASc, PEng, and Andrea La Greca, PE.
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