The impact of aging and environmental conditions on the effective thermal conductivity of several foam materials

The thermal conductivity, a fundamental property for insulating materials, is often advertised using a single value implied to be constant. However, research shows that the effective thermal conductivity changes as a result of material aging and the environmental parameters, including temperature and moisture content levels. In recent years, linear temperature-dependent laws have been occasionally proposed for inorganic fibrous materials, although there is increasing awareness of the fact that foam insulating materials have less regular temperature-dependent behaviours. This depends on the fact that the equilibrium among the different gasses in the material changes over time. In this paper, several polyurethane and polyisocyanurate foams are analysed in order to determine how the effective thermal conductivity is altered after accelerated aging obtained by exposing them to high temperature, high relative humidity levels, and freeze-thaw cycling. For each material, and after each aging exposure condition, measurements of the thermal conductivity were collected over a large temperature range from −20 °C to +40 °C using a Heat Flux Meter. These experimental results allow to build 3-D plots showing the effective thermal conductivity as a function of temperature and moisture content for both pristine and aged materials. Then, the measured results are used in hygrothermal simulations performed inputting the measured temperature- and moisture-dependent thermal conductivity in order to determine the effective performance of the considered insulating materials in both pristine and aged conditions. Results show that the aging of the foams and the operating temperatures have higher impacts on the insulating performance of polyisocyanurates than on polyurethanes. Additionally, high moisture levels contribute to lower performance in all foam materials, with open cell foams experiencing the greatest thermal resistance reduction. The increase in the energy fluxes across the insulating layer with respect to the constant thermal conductivity assumption was significantly higher once the effective thermal conductivity of aged materials was considered, especially when polyisocyanurate foams were modelled in cold and humid conditions.