INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND
1.2 BACKGROUND
The development of these guidelines was originally motivated by GSA's experience with office
buildings exhibiting poor thermal envelope performance (Grot). Diagnostic evaluations of these
buildings revealed the existence of high levels of air leakage and numerous thermal insulation
system defects. GSA realized that improvements in building envelope design and construction
were necessary to avoid these situations in future projects and entered into an agreement with the
Building and Fire Research Laboratory at NIST to develop these design guidelines. Several
sources of information were employed in the development of the design guidelines, including a
review of published literature, voluntary contributions acquired by a BTECC/NlBS project
committee, comments from the project committee itself, and a group of technical consultants to
NIST.
Literature Review
The development of the NIST/GSA envelope design guidelines began with a review of research
results and technical information on thermal envelope performance and design (Persily). This
review included the examination of research on thermal envelope performance, case studies of
thermal envelope performance defects, thermal envelope designs specifically intended to avoid
such defects, and presentations of design principles for ensuring good thermal envelope
performance.
The information considered in the review was drawn from primarily two sources, the building design
and construction community and the building research community. Given that there is more
publication on the part of the research community, this review is more extensive in the area of
research findings. A variety of sources were employed in this review, and they are listed in the
bibliography contained in Appendix A. These sources include the Transactions of the American
Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), along with the
proceedings of the conferences on Thermal Performance of the Exterior Envelopes of Buildings
sponsored by ASHRAE, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Building Thermal Envelope
Coordinating Council (BTECC) in 1979, 1982, 1985 and 1989. The proceedings of the 1986
Symposium on Air Infiltration, Ventilation and Moisture Transfer sponsored by BTECC was also a
useful source of information. Several STPs (Special Technical Publications) published by the
American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) were also reviewed. In addition, the Institute of
Research in Construction (IRC, formerly the Division of Building Research or DBR) at the National
Research Council of Canada (NRCC) has published many informative documents containing
research results and building design information. A variety of other publications were examined
including architectural handbooks, construction guides, and research reports from governmental
and private organizations.
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