Abstract
Indoor air humidity is closely related to daily life and productivity. It is necessary to develop new materials which can maintain the indoor humidity environment steady within an acceptable range of 40–70%. In this paper a new composite hygroscopic material composed of wood fibre and sepiolite with expanded perlite (CHM-WSE) is used in a building envelope to evaluate its moisture buffering performance. A series of experiments assessing the microstructure, hygroscopicity, mechanical and thermodynamic properties of the new composite hygroscropic material have been executed. Furthermore, a numerical model for predicting the influence of humidity environment and energy consumption on composite hygroscopic mortar in different climatic regions has been established. The experiments show that the indoor moisture buffering performance in late spring is better than that in winter, when the practical moisture buffering performance can reach at 0.89 g/(m2%RH)@8/16h; and the non-uniformity coefficient of indoor relative humidity is about 0.006. The simulation results show that a room with CHM-WSE is more comfortable than a common mortar (CM) room, and it has better energy-saving performance in the hot summer and cold winter (HSCW) region in China. The experiments and simulations show that the developed hygroscopic material could be feasible for application in buildings.
Highlights
Relative air humidity is one of the important environmental parameters closely related to daily life and productivity [1]
The simulation results show that a room with CHM-WSE is more comfortable than a common mortar (CM) room, and it has better energy-saving performance in the hot summer and cold winter (HSCW) region in China
Many evidences have indicated that high or low indoor humidity environments are closely related to many health problems [2,3,4], energy consumption [5] and the durability of the building envelope [6,7]
Summary
Relative air humidity is one of the important environmental parameters closely related to daily life and productivity [1]. Many evidences have indicated that high or low indoor humidity environments are closely related to many health problems [2,3,4], energy consumption [5] and the durability of the building envelope [6,7]. Hygroscopic building materials can absorb moisture in a high humidity environment and desorb it in a low humidity environment, and they can adjust the indoor relative humidity without energy consumption. These materials have drawn increasing interest of researchers
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