Abstract
This paper presents a user-friendly tool—FLoW1D (One-Dimensional Water Flow)—for the estimation of parameters that characterize the unsaturated moisture transfer in porous building materials. FLoW1D has been developed in Visual Basic for Applications and implemented as a function of the well-known Microsoft Excel© spreadsheet application. The aim of our work is to provide a simple and useful tool to improve the analysis and interpretation of conventional tests for the characterization of the hygric behavior of porous building materials. FLoW1D embraces the conceptual model described in EN 15026 for moisture transfer in building elements, and its implementation has been verified and validated correctly. In order to show the scope of the code, an example of an application has been presented. The hygric characterization of the limestone that is mostly employed in the Cathedral of Santa Maria and San Julian in Cuenca (Spain) was conducted based on an analysis of the conventional water absorption by capillarity tests (EN 15801).
Highlights
The conservation of architectural heritage is a social and economic responsibility, both for its cultural value and its value as a source of wealth for society [1]
In the current state-of-the-art approaches, the standard experimental tests focused on obtaining the hygric properties of the porous building materials used in architectural heritage are not aimed at triggering processes characterized by a single material parameter; in contrast, they are generally tests in which several physical processes are coupled together
The water absorption by capillarity (WAC) test has been selected for the parameter estimation exercises, as other authors have done for cement–lime mortars containing phase change materials [21]
Summary
Virginia Cabrera , Rubén López-Vizcaíno * , Ángel Yustres *, Miguel Ángel Ruiz, Enrique Torrero and Vicente Navarro. The authors have made the FLoW1D tool available to the scientific community as open-source code to encourage its use and improvement according to the needs of each characterization or research project
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