Techno-economic evaluation of roof thermal insulation for a hypermarket in equatorial climate: Malaysia

One of the effective measures to save cooling energy in countries with an equatorial climate like Malaysia is through the use of roof thermal insulation. This paper focuses on the economic evaluation of commonly used thermal insulation solutions for a typical hypermarket roof in Malaysia. Eight commonly used thermal insulation systems have been identified and evaluated. In order to find the most cost-effective thermal insulation measure, three types of economic evaluation methods i.e. life-cycle savings, discounted payback period and internal rate of return have been used. All the eight thermal insulation systems were ranked accordingly to these three methods It has been found that insulation system using small bubble aluminium foil ranked first with the highest life-cycle savings, internal rate of return and the shortest payback period. Sensitivity analyses have also been carried out to identify the effects of changes in the key parameters for example cost of capital and lifetime period have on the evaluation results. The analyses show that small bubble aluminium foil is least susceptible to fluctuation of these two parameters relative to other examined insulation materials.