Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.
Heat and moisture transport in buildings have a large impact
on the building envelope durability, the energy consumption in
buildings and the indoor climate. Nowadays HAM (Heat, Air
and Moisture) models are widely used to simulate and predict
the effect of these transport phenomena in detail.
Recently these HAM models are being coupled to CFD
(Computational Fluid Dynamics) to study the moisture
exchange between air and porous materials on a local scale
(microclimates). A direct coupling approach between CFD and
HAM is applied. The transport equations for heat and moisture
in a porous material are directly implemented into an existing
CFD package and the transport equations in the air and in the
porous material are solved in one iteration by only one solver.
In this paper a model for moisture transport in the
hygroscopic range and over-hygroscopic range is developed.
This way a broad range of problems can be tackled such as
drying phenomena and interstitial condensation in building
components. The model is verified and validated with data
from literature.
