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BREEAM and LEED in architectural rehabilitation
Published in Paulo Jorge da Silva Bartolo, Fernando Moreira da Silva, Shaden Jaradat, Helena Bartolo, Industry 4.0 – Shaping The Future of The Digital World, 2020
Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) is a fluorine-based plastic. It was designed to have high corrosion resistance and strength over a wide temperature range. ETFE is a polymer and its source-based name is poly (ethene-co-tetrafluoroethene).
Sustainable textile roofs in architecture and design
Published in Gianni Montagna, Cristina Carvalho, Textiles, Identity and Innovation: In Touch, 2020
The ETFE can be applied in big spans roofs, shopping centres, offices, stadiums, skylights, conventional buildings, among others. Based on the projects developed by the IASO Company, and displayed on-line, some cases will be presented. One example of the application of the ETFE is the roofing of the old church of Sant Pere, in Corbera d’Ebre Spain, where a span of 700 m2 was covered. Due to the Spanish Civil War the church was destroyed. Considering the interest of this building to the Spanish architecture, this monument was rehabilitated in several phases, and a roofing of EFTE was foreseen. Other examples of EFTE roofing are: the façade and exterior ring of Allianz Riviera Stadium, in Nice, France; the Shopping Center Islazul, in Spain, which is the first of the kind in Spain (Iaso; 2014a).
Plastics
Published in Arthur Lyons, Materials for Architects and Builders, 2019
Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene copolymer (ETFE) is used as a translucent foil for low-pressure pneumatic metal-framed building envelope cushions. The fluorocopolymer has the advantages over glass that when used to form two- to five-layer air cushion systems, it offers higher thermal insulation with greater transparency to UV light. ETFE is strong, shatterproof, half the cost and only one-hundredth the weight of the equivalent glass, thus offering significant economies to the required structural supporting system. ETFE, with an anticipated lifespan of 25 years, can withstand maintenance loads, be easily repaired, and is recyclable. It has been used very effectively on the galvanised tubular steel space-frame envelope for the biomes (domes sheltering plants from around the world) at the Eden Project, Cornwall (Fig. 10.16). The structure is formed from an icosahedral geodesic outer layer, with a combination of hexagons, pentagons and triangles as the inner layer of the three-dimensional space frame. Only a small pumping system, powered by photovoltaic cells, is required to maintain the air fill of the ETFE cushions.
Measuring the thermal resistance of double and triple layer pneumatic cushions for textile architectures
Published in Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 2021
Andrea Alongi, Adriana Angelotti, Alessandro Rizzo, Alessandra Zanelli
Pneumatic cushions are widely adopted in the so-called textile architecture with a variety of multilayered solutions, composed of 2 up to 5 layers to increase the thermal insulation: the resulting air gaps are inflated to an extra pressure of 200–300 Pa up to 600–900 Pa. As far as materials are concerned, coated textiles, like PVC-coated polyester, or Fluor polymeric foils, like ETFE, can be used. The first is generally preferred when disassembly and reassembly are foreseen, since the material can be folded many times without damaging. Therefore PES/PVC cushions are mainly found in temporary use installations, such as seasonal covers for sports halls (Suo, Angelotti, & Zanelli, 2015), or in adaptable textile envelopes, such as the Chianciano Terme Pavillion by P. Bodega. Conversely ETFE is preferred when a highly transparent solution is required, so that ETFE is often considered a lightweight alternative to glass for roofs and atria (Robinson-Gayle, Kolokotroni, Cripps, & Tanno, 2001). However, the very high solar transmission (Liu, Li, Chen, Zhou, & Zhang, 2016) can cause overheating in summer, so that ink printing and more recently so-called 3D printing (Cremers & Marx, 2017), are proposed to better control solar gains. Photovoltaics can also be integrated into transparent ETFE cushions (Hu et al., 2015; Hu et al., 2016). In this regard, the testing carried out on a triple layer ETFE cushion in summer conditions performed by Hu, Chen, Zhao, and Song, (2014) shows that integrating Amorphous Silicon PV cells in the middle layer does not compromise the structural behavior of the bottom and top ETFE layers and allows to effectively produce electricity and collect thermal energy.