Material climate monitoring in wooden buildings in sub-Alpine environments in Slovenia

Miha Humar,Davor Kržišnik,Boštjan Lesar

doi:10.14293/icmb210030

Abstract

<p class="first" id="d937711e61">Wood is one of the most important construction materials and its use in building applications has further expanded in recent decades. In order to enable even more extensive and reliable use of wood in outdoor applications, factors affecting wood’s service life need to be understood. It is well known that fungal degradation of wood is predominantly affected by temperature (T) and moisture content (MC). In order to elucidate the influence of these two factors, long term monitoring of T, relative humidity (RH) and MC at six locations was carried out: a model house made of thermally modified wood in Mozirje (1), the WWII partisan hospital Franja (2), a traditional hayrack in Pokljuka (3), a house in the north of Slovenia in Vrba (4), building for bird watching in Koper (5) and recently build building in Ljubljana (6). The results clearly showed that fungal degradation of wood is influenced by MC and T. In addition, the influence of micro-climatic conditions on fungal decay can be shown. <p id="d937711e63"/>

Highlights

Wood is one of the most important construction materials and its use in building applications has further expanded in recent decades
Hygrothermal measurements in test houses or real buildings have long been used to address building performance at full-scale in a real environment [1]. These monitoring were performed on various type of buildings, from wooden [2] to buildings made of straw [3]
Field measurements are useful primarily because they expose building components to the whole range of exposure conditions, that cannot be simulated in laboratory conditions

Summary

Introduction

Wood is one of the most important construction materials and its use in building applications has further expanded in recent decades. These monitoring were performed on various type of buildings, from wooden [2] to buildings made of straw [3]. They can be used to validate the models and to correlate these data with service life data of wood.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion