A Patent Pending Light Weight Panelized Overcladding System.
Product description: The Thermalswitch Building Envelope Extension™ is an overclad adapter panel that creates secondary barriers opposite a new or existing window or opaque wall to capture air for use as a thermal insulator and may be coupled with potential ventilation strategies to pre-condition and filter airborne particulates.
Window replacement in the commercial and residential markets and full-on facade retrofit in the mid to high-rise typologies have become a greater necessity due to the aging and dwindling performance of our existing building stock. However, such replacements or renovations can be a costly expense to the building and homeowners with huge implications for disruption of the building and its occupants, be it residential or commercial. The Thermalswitch Building Envelope Extension System is designed to resolve the costly replacement, renovation, and disruption to the building occupants while increasing the thermal performance of the existing envelope.
At the core of this concept is:
Creating a second skin to buffer the exterior air from the interior conditioned air while also leveraging the insulative resistance of cavity air to increase the performance of the wall or window assembly.
Utilize a infill membrane barrier, primarily from ETFE film, which is an architectural polymer, weather resistance, flame retardant, and can be imbued with UV/IR cutting properties to limit solar radiation and heat loss/gain. It can also be fritted, tinted, and printed with other various aesthetic and performative coatings.
The Thermalswitch panel is extremely lightweight compared to other overclad panels and can be mounted directly to existing glazing or wall assembly with minimal imposed loads as opposed to a glass retrofit solution.
ETFE film operational thickness is exponentially smaller than glass, and pound per-square-foot relative to embodied carbon, the Thermalswitch system could cover 100 times more area before it equaled the same carbon emissions that a standard glass system.
