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Structured
Insulated Panels |
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History of SIPs
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The earliest examples of SIPs can be found
in the Usonian houses designed by Frank
Lloyd Wright in the 1930s. Wright was
trying to incorporate beauty and simplicity
into low costing houses. Some walls in
these houses had three layers which
consisted of plywood and two layers of tar
paper as structural elements, but since they
had no insulation in them, they were never
produced in large scale quantities.
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Alden B. Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical
Co. and a student of Wright, experimented
further with the three layer concept.
Dow was concerned about energy efficiency
and the dwindling resources, and realized
that the lack of insulation in the Usonian
projects was not going to save energy.
He developed a structural panel in 1950 in
which he added an insulated foam interior
core, thus he is generally given credit with
producing the first structural insulated
panels. |
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Dow’s early
houses were built in Midland, Michigan using
panels constructed of 1 5/8-in. Styrofoam
cores and 5/16-in. plywood facings for the
load-bearing walls. These same panels were
also installed over the roof framing on
42-in. centers. |
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Shortly after this early experimentation
with SIPs, entrepreneurs started
manufacturing these new building materials.
Some of the first significant manufacturing
efforts came in 1959 with the Koppers
Company. The Koppers Company converted
an auto production plant in Detroit into a
SIP production facility using a method of
blowing pre-expanded Styrofoam beads between
two sheets of plywood and bonding them with
steam to the facings, which were already
glued to a solid supporting framework. |
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This process that the Koppers Company used
was slow, and early SIP houses met
resistance from carpenters' unions in the
North. The Unions believed that since
SIP houses were constructed so quickly that
they would loose work, so the unions
deliberately slowed the erection process
from the typical two days in the South to
almost twice that in the northern states.
In this time, the production of SIPs were
slow, and with cheap energy costs, Koppers
left the field to build refrigeration
components. |
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In the early 1960s, Alside Home Program
entered into the SIP marketplace, and
introduced some significant improvements.
Alside reduced production time
per panel to 20 minutes each, which before
would take several hours with Koppers.
However, after several years of production
and less than 100 SIP houses built, this
company was also forced out of business due
to lack of demand. It wasn't until the
mid 1980s that a significant number of SIP
manufacturers started to appear and had the
capability to meet the expected consumer
demand |
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The reason that SIPs became more popular was
due to consumer knowledge and the
availability of this knowledge. Change
often times keeps people from wanting to try
different things. Even though tests
proved that SIPs were better for the
environment and cheaper for the consumer
over time, people did not want to use them
because there was little known about them.
The American public is aware of
environmental problems, and green building
materials and strategies have become more
important when designing buildings and
communities. SIPs are the answer to
environmental problems that have arisen and
with this knowledge out there, people are
starting to turn to them more than ever. |
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Source: Building With
Structured Insulated Panels (SIPs).
Strength and Energy Efficiency Through
Structural Panel Construction.
Michael Morley. Taunton Press.
2000 |
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