Why you should model and calculate in 3D - a publication by Dr. Pont: 

The consideration of thermal bridges in building envelopes gained importance in recent years. This is due to their potential impact on the overall thermal building performance of highly-insulated buildings. Moreover, energy-efficient buildings tend to be more sensitive to problems associated with thermal bridges, such as surface condensation, mould growth, and thermal comfort issues. Therefore, planners must minimize the negative impact of thermal bridges. Although user-friendly thermal bridge simulation tools are available, they are not yet widely used in practice. Instead, planners often rely on generic details from the building construction literature. The thermal performance of such details often remains unknown, given the wide range of possible building materials (and their thermal properties). In this contribution, we present the results of a thermal bridge simulation of a set of such standard details. Thereby, we assessed vertical sections through typical constructions via 2D thermal bridge simulation, as well as 3D corner situations constituted by such 2D sections. This was done to address two research questions: i. How do typical details perform, given the large range of thermal properties of applied materials? ii. How does the performance of the 3D-thermal bridges compare to their constituent 2D-details, and is it possible to use 2D results to approximate the results of 3D thermal bridges?

Link to the publication: http://www.antherm.at/antherm/C75_postreview.pdf