Coupled simulation of heat and moisture transport in air and porous materials for the assessment of moisture related damage

This paper describes the coupling of a model for heat and moisture transport in porous materials to a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package. The combination of CFD and the material model makes it possible to assess the risk of moisture related damage in valuable objects for cases with large temperature or humidity gradients in the air. To couple both models the choice was made to integrate the porous material model into the CFD package. This requires the heat and moisture transport equations in the air and the porous material to be written down in function of the same transported variables. Validation with benchmark experiments proved the good functionality of the coupled model. A simulation study of a microclimate vitrine for paintings shows that phenomena observed in these vitrines are well predicted by the model and that data generated by the model provides additional insights in the physical mechanisms behind these phenomena.