| Summary: | Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016 The purpose of this research project is to investigate an alternative exhaust thimble design. Exhaust thimbles provide building code mandated protection of the structure materials from the heat produced by flue gases. Current designs are ill suited for arctic conditions. They do not maintain necessary building envelope and thermal insulation integrity. A well thought out rctic design would allow for the thermal and vapor barrier integrity to be maintained without sacrificing performance. Design concepts were rendered by engineers at UAF due to necessity. From concept, full scale models were built and tested in summer and winter conditions. These prototypes use a natural convective process to maintain an outer layer skin temperature below the combustion range. Thermocouples were placed to capture the transient and steady state thermal data and a hot wire anemometer was used to record flow velocities at steady state. Following field research, the collected data was organized and used to refine computer modeling that was done using COMSOL software. The result was a clear indication that this design has promise.
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