The  EENSULATE project has come to an end, after almost 5 years of intensive work.

The project started in 2016, with the challenging objective of developing an affordable (28% reduction of total refurbishment costs), lightweight (35% weight reduction versus the best performing modules in the market), and energy-efficient (reducing energy bills by at least 20% ) solution for the renovation of a specific typology of buildings, the ones provided with curtain wall glass façades. In recent decades thousands of buildings have been built using this construction system, and many of them are nowadays thirty to fifty years old or even more, and therefore in need of refurbishment. Considering that windows and glass surfaces are estimated to be responsible for more than 60% of energy losses in buildings, retrofitting glass curtain walls clearly enables a significant step-change in the achievement of the carbon-neutral and efficient building stock.

The EENSULATE objectives have been achieved through the development of three main key enabling technologies:

• Highly insulating mono and bi-component environmentally friendly foams, to be used for the opaque part of the curtain wall modules and for the reduction of thermal bridges during installation.
• A lightweight and thin double pane vacuum glass (VIG), to be used for the vision glazing part of curtain walls and for window replacement, manufactured by means of an innovative low-temperature process based on the application of a durable edge seal system with a distributed gettering technology.
• A multi-functional thermo-tunable coating based on novel moth-eye nanostructures, capable to control solar gains based on temperature and switchable from 20 to 70% G value

The aforementioned technologies can be combined to offer three different commercial products, namely an EENSULATE Basic curtain wall module (consisting of the novel VIG for the visual part and the bicomponent foam for the spandrel part), an EENSULATE Premium curtain wall module integrating also the thermo-chromic coated glass with additional self-cleaning and antifogging functionalities and a fenestration solution for historical buildings, including the EENSULATE VIG.

Acoustic Mock-Up (in line with UNI EN ISO 16283-3:2016/EC 1-2016/EC 2-2016 and UNI EN ISO 717-1:2013), performance Mock-Up (in line with EN ISO 13830:2005) and Fire Mock-Up tests have been successfully conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness of the EENSULATE facade system design and the correctness of the manufacturing process. Moreover, a U value of 0,44 W/m2K was achieved.

The EENSULATE façade modules and fenestration solutions have been installed in three real-scale buildings as demonstration sites of the project (a school and a museum in Dzierżoniów and the San Giovanni public library in Pesaro) and data confirming the expected performance have been gathered.

Now that project is ended, the key partners involved in the development of the enabling technologies as well as in the VIG manufacturing process are strongly committed to complete the scale-up and industrialisation of the production process, in order to be able to commercialise the EENSULATE products in 2 years from now.

The path towards the achievement of the project completion has been arduous sometimes, especially because of the COVID -19 outbreak that occurred right at the most critical stage of the project – large scale production and installation of the EENSULATE solutions at demo sites – but thanks to the joint effort of all the partners of the consortium we managed to overcome the difficulties and to successfully get to the finish line, being able to offer to the stakeholders a breakthrough solution to achieve the objective of nearly zero energy buildings.

Paola Robello & Daniela Reccardo, RINA Consulting S.p.A.