Currently, the energy issues brought a lot of interest in the community. Now is the focus more on building energy-efficient houses. A significant factor influencing energy consumption in our buildings is thermal bridges. They occur when a material with poor thermal insulation breaks through a material with better insulation. In practice it is often not possible to avoid thermal bridges completely, but there are many different options to reduce the thermal bridge effect significantly. This is desirable in order to achieve lower energy costs because thermal bridges can lead to a significant increase in the heat losses. The limitation of this degree project is evident from the title Thermal bridges impact on the insulation properties of sandwich panels, the connection between the windows and external walls
The primary means used to achieve the results is the HEAT2 PC-program, but literature studies were also used. HEAT2 is a two-dimensional heat flow program that calculates the amount of energy passed through the part of the construction. It is based on the allocation of the construction into a mesh, i.e. a grid. The more the mesh is divided into the more accurate the results, but the calculations are at the same time more time consuming to perform.
A separate analysis was done with and without the draining protective plastic in the window's top edge where the material is passing through the thermal insulation at the concrete heel. The plastic has many orders of magnitude higher thermal conductivity than the thermal insulation, but it is only 1 mm thick. The calculation results show that the plastic caused a significant difference.