Twin Rooms – Experimental Facility for Research on Advanced Facades

New or advanced materials, improved structures in construction, and environmental technological principles are being concurrently and constantly implemented across various individual scientific and engineering disciplines. The field of facade engineering is also enriched with these elements, which are combined into larger units and thus create developed modules. These advanced facade modules need to be researched and tested from several perspectives. The testing and evaluation of building envelopes occur in either static boundary conditions (a laboratory) or dynamic conditions (climatic) in real time. The choice of testing method depends on the specific purpose or the phenomenon investigated that is related to the construction of the building envelope.

In 2023, the newly developed Twin Rooms experimental facility was finished and put into operation. The Twin Rooms facility is based on a test cells principle intended for experimental verification, which means it is designed for experimental research on advanced facade elements in dynamic boundary conditions and is focused on the thermal engineering and energy efficiency of buildings. The test cells comprise two identical laboratory rooms and a compensation space inside of a container; as with research on pavilions, they all maintain the same indoor climate. Only the facade elements of the modules tested are exposed to the outdoor climate; such an arrangement makes it possible to determine an exchange of energy between the testing room and the outside environment only through the facade element. This article provides an overview of the experimental equipment, outlines the basic technical parameters of its technological circuits, and details the methodology employed in the experimental measurements.