The overall performance of a building envelope is mainly related to the performance of the different materials of building components. The performance of those specific components may be very well known in different research area’s (thermal properties, acoustics, airtightness, watertightness…), experience points out the weakest link is in fact the interface between those different components.
There are a number of elements that caused a shift in the way we think about building envelope interfaces.
- First of all, an overall increasing life standard causes people to have higher expectations when it comes to newly constructed residential buildings. A few decades ago houses used to be “somewhat warm, somewhat dry and somewhat comfortable” as J. D. Katsaros (Katsaros and Hardman, 2007) puts it. Today people have strict demands and even the slightest mark of water infiltration can give rise to disputes and legal actions.
- Due to an increased attention to environmental issues and the spectacular rise of energy prices governments and individual builders invest in higher insulation levels, more airtight buildings and the use of sustainable solutions.
- In a lot of countries building regulation codes are evolving from prescriptive codes towards performance based standards (Sjöström 1999, Haberecht et al., 1999). That way those standards will make way for expanding the limits of free trade in a globalizing world. The development of a methodology for performance assessment of building products, components and constructions is crucial for the future implementation of performance based standards. Building envelope interfaces cannot be evaluated using the performance criteria of the adjacent building components, so specific research is needed in order to quantify those interfaces in different areas.
As the current building practice in Europe uses more and more self-adhesive flashings there is a major need for performance-based criteria to assess their short- and long-term behavior.
This paper looks into different existing methodologies for artificial aging of samples and offers a state-of-the-art concerning research on self-adhering flashings. Initial experiments seem to contradict some of the found results concerning the performance of different types of adhesives (butyl/modified asphalt). Lab experiments also point out that the interaction between certain adhesives and substrates needs further investigation in order to avoid future water infiltration problems. Three types of self-adhering flashings are tested on four different substrates in lab conditions and after artificial aging to investigate the long-term performance of different flashings. Also the influence of the use of primers is analyzed
