Experimental validation of coupled heat, air and moisture transfer modeling in multilayer building components

The present paper lies to study the coupled heat, air and moisture transfer in multi-layer building materials. Concerning the modeling part, the interest is to predict the hygrothermal behavior, by developing a macroscopic model that incorporates simultaneously the diffusive, convective and conductive effects on the building elements. Heat transfer is considered in the strongly coupled situation where the mass and heat flux are temperature, vapor pressure and total pressure dependents. The model input parameters are evaluated experimentally through the development of various experimental prototypes in the laboratory. Thereafter, an experimental setup has been established in order to evaluate the hygrothermal process of several multilayer walls configurations. The experimental procedure consists to follow the temperature and relative humidity evolutions within the samples thickness, submitted to controlled and fixed boundary conditions. This procedure points out diverging conclusion between different testing materials combinations (e.g. red-brick and polystyrene). In fact, the hygrothermal behavior of the tested configurations is completely dependent on both materials selection and their thermophysical properties. Finally, comparison between numerical and experimental results showed good agreement with acceptable errors margins with an average of 3 %.