Retrofitting facades of modern/industrial era from inside: Hygrothermal performance

Internal insulation is often the only measure to reduce heat loss for facades that are worth preservation, both from a sustainable and architectural point of view. However, insulation from inside may make the original wall vulnerable for mois-ture related problems. Recent years, quite a lot of research on moisture safe inter-nal insulation of solid brick masonry walls has been conducted.

This study takes up the challenge of transforming the experiences from solid brick masonry walls to facades of modern/industrial era up to 1980’s. Brick masonry is still often on the exterior side but combined with concrete or light weight concrete on the inte-rior side with or without a cavity. Hardly any research on this topic has been conducted and therefore this paper introduces some first investigations of the hy-grothermal performance of retrofitting above types of facades from inside.

The study is conducted as a simulation study, where a number of relevant construc-tions and insulation systems are analysed. Solid brick masonry is used as refer-ence. The results indicate that internal insulation has a good potential for most masonry facades of modern/industrial era. However, insulating solid concrete fa-cades from inside is only possible under certain circumstances.