Hygrothermal performance of straw bales split-insulation wall assembly in cold and humid climates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The abundance of straw in Quebec makes this material an interesting insulation option to reduce the energy consumption of buildings. At the same time, studies indicate that straw bales’ outstanding hygrothermal performance can provide a comfortable living experience for the occupants. However, due to the slightly higher thermal conductivity of straw bales insulation compared to common insulation materials, the walls are found to be 30–90% thicker, which can lead to moisture-related problems especially under a humid and cold outdoor climate. Therefore, a split-insulation wall structure was used in this study to reduce the wall thickness by combining straw bales with expanded polystyrene (EPS) exterior insulation. Results show that straw bale walls generally have higher thermal inertia and better moisture buffer capacity compared to the reference wall using glass fiber insulation. The hygrothermal profiles show that the sheathing-insulation interface is the position having the highest relative humidity in the walls. The biohygrothermal model also suggests that under Quebec’s climate, the mould grow risk in a straw bales wall with two inches EPS exterior insulation is within acceptable limits.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".