Health and wellbeing

Aim

To ensure that appropriate thermal comfort levels are achieved through design, and controls are selected to maintain a thermally comfortable environment for occupants within the building.

Our contribution

Glazing has an important role to play in thermal comfort criterion thanks to its two following characteristics:

• The thermal insulation of the glass (also known as the “Ug value”) that represents the heat loss; and 
• The solar factor (also called the “g value”) that corresponds to the percentage of total solar radiant heat energy transmitted through the glazing.

The wide variety of possible configurations from Saint-Gobain Glass allows you to create the ideal glazing solution according to outdoor conditions and customer preferences. For instance, for heating dominant climates, what is defined as a high performance insulation glass will provide an excellent Ug value while reducing heat losses to a minimum.

However, for mainly cooling dominant climates, selectivity also has to be considered. Selectivity is defined as the light transmission percentage divided by the g value (LT/g) and corresponds to how effective the glazing is at blocking heat but letting in sunlight.

Our glass for facades and windows offers three options for optimal thermal comfort:

• Optimized thermal insulation: this corresponds to the good match between the thermal insulation (Ug value) and the solar factor according to the context of use of the glazing (i.e. the geometry and geographical localization of the building, the window size and orientation, and customer preferences). Below you will find some examples of glazing configurations that we can offer:

• Active solution: our EGLA-S glass is recommended for extreme weather conditions in particular. It is an integrated and invisible heating glass solution that can additionally contribute to indoor thermal comfort by controlling radiant heat.
• Better spacer: we can also limit heat loss by using a better spacer when glass is mounted in a double or triple glazing format. For instance, Swisspacer® is a performing, warm edge spacer bar that improves the Ug value (noted Uw for a window) for better insulation.