Development of HAM tool for building envelope analysis

Moisture-related building envelope failures have resulted in costly rehabilitation in various regions of North America. To advance building envelope design towards an engineering approach and reduce the occurrence of future failures, an advanced numerical tool was developed, in conjunction with an extensive full-scale experiment, to investigate hygrothermal performance of various wood-frame wall assemblies. Major features of the tool are multi-dimensional and transient coupling of heat and moisture transport; natural air convection integrated in hygrothermal simulation through Darcy–Boussinesq approximation; heat transfer by conduction and convection of sensible and latent heat; moisture transport by vapor diffusion, capillary suction and convection; material database of common building materials in North America; experimental settings or weather data as boundary conditions; and moisture added in the building envelope to simulate the wetting process. The numerical tool achieves good compliances to the benchmarking cases of the HAMSTAD project, and its predictions have shown good agreement with data from the full-scale wall experiment. The numerical tool employs the commercial finite-element software to solve the governing equations. This approach provides building science researchers the flexibility to modify, maintain and share their modeling work efficiently.