Test facility could revolutionize local building practices

An experiment under way in the Lowcountry may permanently change the way buildings are constructed throughout the entire Southeast. A partnership among private industry, the Department of Energy, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the town of Hollywood resulted in the realization of the National Exposure Test Facility.

The facility in Hollywood is designed to determine how natural elements affect buildings. One of only two such programs in the country, the facility will specifically study how warm and humid climates affect building materials, especially when the relatively modern convenience of air conditioning is introduced to the mix.

The building resembles a low warehouse and contains inside space for 30 panels that can each test a different material or weather element. The panels are connected to a circuit board that records myriad data, including outside weather conditions and exactly what is happening to the material inside the walls. The experiments will run through one weather cycle—about a calendar year—to determine how they react to different weather conditions and how those reactions change as the outside climate does.

“There have been almost no studies about building materials in warm and humid climates and those that have been done are passé,” says Barry Hardman, a partner with National Building Science Corp., which facilitated the partnership between industry and the government. “There’s a great deal of plastic and fiberglass that is used today. Materials inside walls can become outdated in as little as five or six years.”

Creating more efficient buildings—buildings that last longer and require less energy to heat and cool—could lead to cost savings and a reduction in pollution, says P. Marc LaFrance, who works in the Energy Department’s office of building technology.

“This is the Cadillac of test facilities,” says LaFrance of the Hollywood test facility, located adjacent to the Baptist Hill High School. “The building sector of our economy uses one third of the economy’s energy and buildings pollute. And, as we all know, energy drives the economy.”

LaFrance says the purpose of the test facility is to study different insulating wall technologies to determine which materials can best be used to create an energy-efficient, non-polluting building.

The problem with warm, humid areas, Hardman says, is that the outside warm and moist air will naturally gravitate to the cooler air. As the water in the air begins to cool, it will condense and settle on the nearest surface.

“The air and water will travel through brick, the gaps and cracks in wood and vinyl siding, overlapped joints and chimneys,” Hardman explains. “As it gets closer and closer to the cool air inside, it condenses and settles. Where that process happens inside the walls is what it’s all about.”

Hardman says if the condensation occurs on the exterior of the material designed to keep out water, there will be no problem, as the water will condense on the material and can be steered away from the structure. If, however, the condensation takes place inside the material and reaches the wood and interior walls, the owner of the structure could have a major problem on his hands.

“That’s where the efficiency of a building begins to break down,” he says.

Much of the wood used in construction today is Oriented Strand Board, or OSB, which is similar to particle board. The board is made up of bits of wood pressed together to form a sheet. While it is light and inexpensive, as well as efficient for making homes, it is also very porous.

“If OSB gets even 20 percent condensed with water, it will start to fall apart,” Hardman says. “Even without that much water, you can always face the problems with mold.”

Energy efficiency is becoming an important factor in the construction of buildings. When more than 30% of energy produced in a building goes to heating or cooling it, buildings need to become more efficient.

“We can’t keep going at that rate,” says Hardman. “We’re using three percent of the world’s energy heating and cooling our buildings and we have to come up with another solution.”

“The problem we face is that traditionally, building studies are done in cooler weather environments, because we’ve been heating buildings far longer than cooling them,” says Larry Elkin of Applied Building Sciences Inc. in North Charleston. “In a warm, humid climate such as we have here, it’s not at all unusual to have wood rotting inside the walls of a building because of condensation.”

Elkin said the study includes areas of the Southeast that represent a comparably small geographic region, but one that has a large population.

“Imagine a strip of land that runs as far inland as Columbia, as far north as Virginia Beach, down around the Southeast coast to Brownsville, Texas,” Elkin says. “It’s not a huge piece of land compared to the rest of the country, but the study of building materials for that particular type of environment hasn’t been done before.”

Stephan Klamke, executive director of the Exterior Insulation and Finish Systems (EIFS) Industry Members Association, says the building industry is seeing a remarkable shift as more high tech products are introduced to the market.

“We’re seeing a world where construction, education, science and technology are bumping up against new frontiers,” Klamke says. “We are facing constant change and constant challenges and this facility proves that we must never stop learning.”

EIFS are multi-layered exterior wall systems that are used on both commercial buildings and homes. Developed in Europe in the 1950s, EIFS were introduced in the United States almost 30 years ago. They were first used on commercial buildings and later on homes. Today EIFS account for nearly 30% of the U.S. commercial exterior wall market, according to the association’s web site.

“I have talked with many people in the building sciences and architecture fields and they are green with envy that we have this facility. They would love a facility like this one,” says Klamke.