Thermally Augmented Cork-based Thin Insulation Coating (TACTIC)

3ca931b6-c96b-445b-8f8f-b485098a5fe2

Closed

Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£752,750

Sept. 30, 2020

June 30, 2021

The TACTIC project will take the existing CorkSol product Thermocork, a sustainable cork based insulating material and reformulate it with nano additives to improve its thermal performance. Thermocork is easily and cost effectively installed and can be used to insulate hard to treat houses. Around 7.7 million UK houses are uninsulated, solid wall construction dwellings and many residents in these houses suffer from fuel poverty, meaning that they struggle to heat their homes due to high fuel bills, caused by heat loss. People in fuel poverty are more likely to suffer underlying respiratory health issues, which increases the severity of viruses such as Covid-19\. Providing a cost effective solution to poorly insulated houses will improve the underlying health of a large proportion of he UK population.

Covid 19 has also had a significant impact in the construction and home improvement industry. The private sector housing repairs and maintenance market saw a 39.8% drop in the three months to May 2020 as a result of the Covid pandemic. Providing a new innovative material that can be used to insulate hard to treat housing to will help generate a new market opportunity for both private homes and also social housing.

TACTIC will reformulate CorkSol's existing Thermocork insulation system with the addition of candidate nano additives to enhance its thermal performance to allow a 10mm coating to have the same equivalence as 50mm of mineral wool and to be applied at a lower cost than alternatives. The new formulation will be tested at both laboratory and real-life scale, where it will be applied using CorkSol's existing aerosol spray method. The project will also examine the market for this new material and produce marketing plan to help generate interest in the core target market of hard to treat homes, especially those in the social housing sector.

The project partners are CorkSol, a successful UK company that has in place an existing product that is sourced sustainably and a network of approved, trained applicators and Teesside University, whose academics have the technical skills needed to work on the product reformulation and testing needed. The project outcome will be a next generation of Thermocork with enhanced thermal properties that can be used on the hard to treat, uninsulated homes that are large part of the UK housing stock.