Parallel modeling of hygrothermal performance of external wall made of highly perforated bricks

Coupled heat and moisture transport in highly perforated bricks is indispensable part of design of energy efficient buildings. Geometry of the perforated bricks is very complicated which results in large number of nodes and elements in numerical analysis. Moreover, material model of the coupled heat and moisture transport leads after discretization to nonsymmetric systems of algebraic equations which need large computer memory. In order to reduce the computational time or to solve problems with many degrees of freedom, parallel computers are employed. Parallelization is based on the Schur complement method which is able to deal with nonsymmetric systems. Example of the coupled heat and moisture transport in a perforated brick of HELUZ company is showed. Real climatic boundary conditions for two different locations are used. (C) 2016 Civil-Comp Ltd. and Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.