Focus on durability, PATH research at the national institute of standards and technology

Researchers at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NI T) in collaboration with the PATH-D program have been working to improve the durability of residential home construction. These efforts have been in two focus areas. The first area involves working through a industry/government consortia to develop greatly improved methodology for the determination of service life of products. This effort has involved the implementation of a reliability-based approach, which indoor and monitored outdoor integrates both controlled exposures into a database that is used to modify and improve a dose-damage model. This model is then used to predict the service life of the materials all achieved in greatly reduced time frame compared with traditional outdoor exposure. The second-focus area is to develop a web-based integrated decision support system that combines the service life predictions from the first effort with robust economic models to show homeowners the added value they can achieve by selecting more durable products.