Modelling and Simulation of the Thermal Performance of Metal Framed Walls

Recently, in the building practice, steel framed walls have increasingly been used. Such wall structures have a lot of advantages. At the same time, such walls have some disadvantages, and the most important of them is the presence of metal elements which lead to the appearance of thermal bridges and, as a result, to an increase in the overall heat transfer coefficient of the wall structure. The objective of this work was to evaluate and compare the thermal insulation properties of metal framed walls. To achieve the objectives of the study, several configurations of metal framed walls with different levels of thermal insulation and the distances between vertical steel studs were modeled. The heat transfer coefficient of the simulated steel framed walls was determined using the THERM 7.6 software. The simulation results showed that the use of an additional external insulation layer is an effective way to mitigate the adverse effects of thermal bridges caused by the presence of metal frames. Changing the distance between the metal studs also leads to heat losses reduction by almost 15% for a wall without an external expanded polystyrene layer. However, the effectiveness of this reduction is slightly less for walls equipped with additional external insulation. The novelty of the work is that the impact of geometric and thermophysical parameters of steel framed walls on their resistance to heat transfer was established and the ways to increase the thermal performance of such wall structures were outlined.