Building Envelope of South Pole Station

The South Pole Station is among the highest performance buidings in the world with regards to conservation of heat energy. The building incorporates myriad technological approaches to capturing and reusing heat from appliances and mechanical processes within the building, but none of these efforts would be effective if the building envelope itself were not so well-insulated.

The building envelope is made of conventional structural insulated panels, a residential building product composed of two sheets of Oriented Strand Board (OSB) sandwiching a slab of Expanded Polystyrene Insulation (EPS). The boards are laminated onto each side of the foam core and work in tandem with the foam as a stress-skin panel--an engineered assembly which is stronger than the sum of its parts. When used on the horizontal plane as part of a floor or roof assembly, a stress-skin panel works the same way as an I-beam with the top panel in compression and the bottom panel in tension.



These high-performance modular building blocks are a highly effective material in polar regions since they are lightweight, very quick and easy to assemble, and combine structure, insulation, and an integral vapour barrier in a single element. The South Pole Station utilizes SIPS for its entire building envelope as both a structural and an insulative element for floors, walls, and roof.

WALL SECTION OF SOUTH POLE STATION


Panels typically come in four foot wide sections with custom lengths of up to sixteen feet and foam core thicknesses up to 11.25". The panels are joined together by means of a spline which fits into both edges of two adjacent panels as a bridge to mechanically fasten them together. The fact that the resulting wall assembly is completely solid with no voids prevents air inflitration and offers a higher performance wall assembly in terms of fire resistance, strength, durability, and thermal resistance.

Link to manufacturer of SIPS for Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station:

http://www.enercept.com/