Dual analysis for heat exchange: Application to thermal bridges

Thermal bridges are areas of risk in the building walls, because they can give rise to uncontrolled increments in heat transfer. A number of studies have looked at thermal bridges, but much of the numerical code for building energy simulations uses heat transfer models based on one-dimensional heat flow analysis. Fabrizio Ascione (2014) showed that this can lead to unreliable results. The originality of this paper is to consider 2D and 3D thermal bridges using dual analysis with mesh sizes smaller than those used in conventional finite element approaches.