ISOVER Saint-Gobain

Saint-Gobain was first established in 1665, by the order of Louis XIV. The Sun King wanted a local French mirror glass production facility, but in more than three centuries that facility had grown to be a multinational construction group, operating in 76 countries. ISOVER is the insulation Swiss branch of the Saint-Gobain group, established in 1937 and currently the leading producer of glass wool in Switzerland.

Glass wool is essentially fibreglass bound with a binder, and is produced in a way resembling cotton candy. Glass is heated up to 12500°C and then forced through evenly spaced small holes and cooled on contact with air. The binder is then applied, and the glass fibres bind together as the binder polymerises. The resulting glass wool product is a soft, cotton-like material.

We saw that for industrial scale production, the production process of our insulation material must be adapted into a production line setting, each step being implemented with maximum efficiency. This led us to imagine the steps and the protocols for our lab work in an industrial setting for our proposed implementation. Process and Quality check steps are also important, especially before the product moves into the more crucial steps in the production line.

As we got to know glass wool better as a material, we started asking questions about our aerogel. Glass wool is not just a thermal insulator, it is also a sound insulator. In addition, the glass wool performs well in reaction to fire, ecology, health, compressibility, ease of application and versatility. For these criteria, official labels and certifications become a must-have. These criteria have led us to rethink some of our values, to put them more in line with the expectations of the industry and the regulations.

Insulation materials are always in a broader context. Certain insulation materials pair better with certain construction materials, and certain modifications in an application bring out the best performance from an insulation material. In this context, we were introduced to a very specific problem: thermal bridges. Glass windows are usually placed more to the interior compared to the outer walls in construction, and the resulting gap cannot be easily insulated due to a lack of space. Aerogel sheets, reaching very low lambda values with considerably less thickness, have started being used to counter these thermal bridges, a very strategic and material efficient application.

Knowing your material requires knowing who will use it, and where your competitors are doing better than you. Understanding how the market works is therefore imperative. We have seen that Switzerland is one of the few countries on the planet where this nascent technology can truly flourish and be optimised. Owing to the innovative spirit of its industry and availability of capital, there are already many applications of aerogel insulation in Swiss construction and renovation projects. The “Made in Switzerland” aerogel has been emerging right before our eyes.