Low-E paints enhanced building components: Performance, limits and research perspectives

In the latest years, different solutions have been developed in order to increase the energy performance of opaque building envelopes as far as the heat losses are concerned. Most of them are mainly focused on the bulk properties of materials and are aimed at reaching very low values of thermal conductivity, i.e., super insulating materials. Contemporarily research has been carried out aimed at exploiting the low emissivity in order to reduce the radiative heat transfer between surfaces separated by cavities and, if applied as an internal coating, in order to increase the indoor thermal comfort. In this paper, several solutions that have been experimentally investigated in the latest two years by the authors are presented.