Functional and advanced insulating and energy harvesting/storage materials

Motivation

Buildings account for around 40% of total energy use and 36% of CO2 emissions in Europe. According to the recast Directive on the energy performance of buildings (EPBD) all new buildings after 2020 should reach nearly zero energy levels, meaning that they should demonstrate very low energy needs mainly covered by renewable energy sources. An urgent need is present for a deep market transformation by deploying efficient materials and technologies in the construction sector to support the real implementation of nearly zero-energy/emission and plus-energy buildings with high indoor environment quality across Europe. Further, this selection of materials and design for climate should be based on a circular economy perspective considering environmental, economic and social effects along value chains.

Project scope

iClimaBuilt’s ultimate goal is to support and help small high-tech firms to scale up and cope with the continuous rising of technological complexity and by translation of research results into innovations. Through its Single-Entry-Point the necessary upgraded infrastructures and tools will be offered to test, validate and upscale new technological solutions. The test cases designed, developed, tested, and validated within the testbed, as a well-studied combination of material technologies per market and climate, contributing to desired energy savings to reach set nZEB balance, will serve as a means for validating and improving selected materials and corresponding innovations and, finally, services of the OITB.
As iClimaBuilt is a user-driven testbed and is based on ‘co-creation, its offering has been preliminarily defined based on industrial companies’ needs assessed with a preliminary market survey (see in Annex, Letters of Interest of entities).

RISE in iClimaBuilt

The project iClimaBuilt goal is to establish a user-driven testbed to offer small high-tech enterprises development, testing and upscaling of innovative materials for building envelopes contributing to reaching near-zero energy building (nZEB) balance. RISE will support the iClimaBuilt Pilot Lines in terms of cellular lightweight concrete insulation and high-performance textile-reinforced concrete for façade elements and contribute to innovative additions like phase-changing materials (PCMs), aerogels, novel insulations components utilizing waste materials and multi-functional composite sandwich panels.

A large part of RISE contribution will be the characterization of the developed elements, where other RISE departments will be involved. RISE will also coordinate the training activities within the project focusing on the implementation of innovation and its upscaling in the client’s premises and installation of materials and components on structures.