IHD and EPH at BAU 2025

The EPH will present itself to the international trade fair audience with its range of services as an accredited/notified testing, inspection and certification body, in particular for construction products such as construction timber, decking, wood-based materials, facades, windows, floors, doors and thermal insulation materials. Find out about the independent emissions and quality label TÜV PROFiCERT-product INTERIOR, for which EPH and TFI are cooperation partners as a testing and inspection body. We are also happy to provide information on the new EU Construction Products Regulation or the REACH formaldehyde regulation.

The IHD is showing selected current research projects in the areas of:

Heat-reflecting wood coatings
Climate change presents new challenges for the building sector. Due to increasing external temperatures, an increased energy demand for cooling buildings can be assumed in the next few years. However, it would be more sustainable to reduce the heat input into buildings from the outset. One approach is to reflect heat radiation immediately upon it striking the object. As part of a research project, scientists at the IHD have been working on the development of heat-reflecting external wood coatings in order to reduce the surface temperature when the sun shines on it by using IR-reflecting pigments in wood coatings. You can find out what results they have achieved at our exhibition stand.

Timber construction monitoring
Timber construction has many advantages due to its light weight and the fact that it can be built quickly thanks to a high degree of prefabrication. As a sustainable raw material, wood has a high CO₂ savings potential and, when processed into semi-finished products, requires significantly less primary energy than conventional building materials such as concrete. As part of a research project, fundamental concepts for a monitoring system adapted to timber construction were developed that includes practical solutions for monitoring humidity, temperature and structural integrity. Due to its particular relevance for timber construction, the project focused on metrological solutions for detecting humidity, with particular emphasis on the TDR (Time-Domain Reflectometry) method.

Oriented Strand Board (OSB) with biogenic flame retardants
In modern timber construction, OSB is mainly used for load-bearing and bracing structures. However, due to their classification as ‘normally flammable’, numerous possible uses as a building element in building classes 4 and 5, e.g. in schools or hospitals, are lost for such versatile wood products. To achieve the required ‘low flammability’, there are a variety of flame retardants (FSM) that can also be integrated into wood-based building materials as impregnations or flame retardant coatings.
Conventional FSM, however, are associated with a number of disadvantages, such as high quantities required, unfavourable changes in material properties, a lack of compatibility with other material components and higher quantities of binders required, and thus higher VOC. These problems in the use of FSM, as well as the increasingly restrictive regulations regarding their use, were taken into account by the IHD scientists in the development of flame-retardant wood products with a biogenic FSM.

Lignocellulose lightweight concrete
The aim of the project was to develop a cement-based lightweight concrete using lignocellulosic secondary raw materials (e.g. scrap wood, bark) and a low-emission, fast-curing calcium sulfoaluminate cement. The combination of readily available plant-based lightweight aggregates with a mineral binder should result in a lightweight construction material with high thermal, sound, fire and moisture protection, which has comparable properties to conventional lightweight concrete at a lower density and is also more sustainable.

You can find out more about the results of all our research projects at our stand in Hall B5, Stand 112. We look forward to seeing you!