The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential for calculation methods to determine the thermal resistance of a wall system containing vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) that has been experimentally characterised using a guarded hot box (GHB) apparatus. The VIPs used in the wall assembly have not been characterised separately to the wall assembly, and therefore exact knowledge of the thermal performance of the VIP including edge effect is not known. The calculations and simulations are completed using methods found in literature as well as manufacturer published values for the VIPs to determine the potential for calculation and simulation methods to predict the thermal resistance of the wall assembly without the exact characterisation of the VIP edge effect. The results demonstrate that disregarding the effect of VIP thermal bridges results in overestimating the thermal resistance of the wall assembly in all calculation and simulation methods, ranging from overestimates of 21% to 58%. Accounting for the VIP thermal bridges using the manufacturer advertised effective thermal conductivity of the VIPs resulted in three methods predicting the thermal resistance of the wall assembly within the uncertainty of the GHB results: the isothermal planes method, modified zone method and the 3D simulation. Of these methods only the 3D simulation can be considered a potential valid method for energy code compliance, as the isothermal planes method requires too drastic an assumption to be valid and the modified zone method requires extrapolating the zone factor beyond values which have been validated. The results of this work demonstrate that 3D simulations do show potential for use in lieu of guarded hot box testing for predicting the thermal resistance of wall assemblies containing both VIPs and steel studs. However, knowledge of the VIP effective thermal conductivity is imperative to achieve reasonable results.

本文的目的是研究确定包含真空隔热板（VIP）的墙系统的热阻的计算方法的潜力，该系统已使用防护热箱（GHB）装置进行了实验表征。墙壁组件中使用的VIP尚未与墙壁组件分开进行特征描述，因此尚不清楚VIP的热性能（包括边缘效应）的确切知识。使用文献中的方法以及制造商发布的VIP值可以完成计算和模拟，从而确定潜在的计算和模拟方法，以预测壁组件的热阻，而无需精确表征VIP边缘效应。结果表明，在所有计算和模拟方法中，忽略VIP热桥的作用都会导致高估墙组件的热阻，范围从高估21％到58％。使用制造商所宣传的VIP的有效导热系数来计算VIP热桥，得出了三种在GHB结果的不确定性范围内预测墙组件热阻的方法：等温平面法，修正区法和3D模拟。在这些方法中，只有3D模拟才能被视为符合能源法规的潜在有效方法，因为等温平面方法要求的假设过于严格，因此有效，而改进的区域方法则需要将区域因子外推到已验证的值之外。这项工作的结果表明，3D仿真确实显示了替代有保护的热箱测试以预测包含VIP和钢钉的墙组件的热阻的潜力。但是，要获得合理的结果，必须了解VIP有效的热导率。