Spray Foam Insulation
Open Cell
Closed Cell
What is spray foam insulation?
Spray foam is a chemical product created by two materials, isocyanate and polyol resin, which react when mixed with each other and expand up to 30-60 times its liquid volume after it is sprayed in place. This expansion makes it useful as a specialty material which produces a high thermal insulating value with virtually no air infiltration.
Spray foam insulation or spray polyurethane foam (SPF) is an alternative to traditional building insulation such as fiberglass. A two-component mixture composed of isocyanate and polyol resin comes together at the tip of a gun and forms an expanding foam that is sprayed onto roof tiles, concrete slabs, into wall cavities, or through holes drilled in into a cavity of a finished wall.
TYPES
Spray polyurethane foam (SPF) insulation can be categorized into two different types: light-density open-cell spray foam insulation and medium-density closed-cell spray foam insulation. Both types of SPF are thermoset cellular plastics comprising millions of small cells.
Open cell insulation can be crushed in your hand and has a lower insulation value. Closed cell is rigid to the touch and each air cell is completely sealed.
Foam insulation blocks all three forms of heat transfer:
• Conductive heat transfer
• Radiant heat transfer
• Convective heat transfer
Spray Foam Benefits
Insulation is one of the most important aspects when designing a building. Choosing a material with high thermal performance for your insulation offers numerous advantages:
- It helps to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature, and therefore to provide a comfortable living and working environment for the people who use the building. It does so by forming a barrier that stops the flow of heat through the building envelope, giving us better control of the interior temperature whatever the temperature outside.
- Helps reduce energy consumption and costs. Insulation is one of the cheapest ways and easy to improve the energy efficiency of buildings. By requiring less energy to heat or cool the building, there will be lower fuel consumption and economic savings for the user.
- Help in the fight against climate change. The energy used in buildings, especially for heating, creates large amounts of carbon dioxide, a gas that increases global warming and harms the environment. By improving the energy efficiency of buildings and reducing energy demand, fewer emissions of this gas are also produced.
- Helps ensure energy supply. Fossil fuel energy sources are finite. If we manage to reduce demand, we will guarantee energy supply for longer.
Among the variety of insulating materials available on the market, polyurethane is the one with the lowest thermal conductivity. This means that insulating buildings with the optimal levels of polyurethane (the appropriate thicknesses) also provides an economic benefit compared to the use of other materials.
The sound insulation of spray foam
Although in this article we focus on the advantages of polyurethane as a thermal insulator, it is also worth noting the acoustic insulation function that polyurethane offers.
It manages to acoustically insulate buildings, helping to dampen both external noise (those that surround the building) and internal noise (neighbors, furniture, etc.) and guaranteeing greater comfort for users.
