Modelling of moisture transport between airflows
and porous materials
Hendrik-Jan Steeman
Supervisor(s): Michel De Paepe, Arnold Janssens
Abstract The modelling of moisture transport between
airflows and porous materials such as wood provides the
necessary information to assess the risk of moisture related
damage to the materials. This paper presents a validated model
that describes both moisture transport in the airflow as in the
porous materials taking into account the non-linearity and
hysteresis of the material properties.
Keywords moisture, porous material, convection, CFD
I. INTRODUCTION
The conservation of culturally or historically valuable
objects poses a complex problem. Often these objects are
placed in historic buildings which were not heated in the past
and hence experienced a stable indoor climate. Due to the
increased demand for thermal comfort these buildings are
now intermittently heated which leads to temperature and
relative humidity fluctuations. These fluctuations can lead to
non-uniform drying of the valuable objects. In case of wood
non-uniform drying leads to non-uniform shrinking which
causes tension inside the material. This can lead to deforming
and eventually cracking of the objects.
To assess the risk of this moisture related damage the
drying of the objects has to be modelled. Hence the moisture
balance equation inside the material has to be solved. The
conditions of the air next to the material are the driving force
for the moisture release or uptake by the material. These local
conditions next to the material can strongly differ from the
conditions in the rest of the indoor air volume. So to
accurately simulate the drying of an object located inside a
room the airflow, temperature and humidity in the room also
have to be modelled.
In this paper a model is presented which solves the heat, air
and moisture flow in the indoor air as well as the moisture
transport inside the porous materials. This makes it possible to
take the effect of the local climate into account in the
simulation of the drying of objects placed inside a room.
II. MODEL
A. General considerations
. Using Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) the flow,
temperature and concentration profiles in a fluid can be
simulated. A CFD model essentially solves the Navier-Stokes
equations which describe the motion of fluids, yet also the
H.J. Steeman is with the Department of Flow, Heat and Combustion
Mechanics, Ghent University (UGent), Gent, Belgium. E-mail:
HendrikJan.Steeman@UGent.be .
energy and species transport equations can be solved to obtain
the temperature and concentration distributions in the fluid.
As CFD provides the most accurate way of simulating fluids
this tool is chosen to model the local climate next to the
porous material.
To link the CFD results to a model that describes the drying
of a porous material the choice was made to add the
governing equations for moisture transport in porous
materials to the CFD code. This approach has the advantage
that one solver is used to solve the equations in both the fluid
as the porous material and that no time consuming coupling
between different programs is necessary.
B. Governing equations in the porous material
Moisture transport in porous materials caused by variations
of relative humidity in the surrounding air takes place in the
vapour phase. Water vapour diffuses through the air filled
pores of the material. The storage of moisture on the other
hand happens in the liquid phase for almost all of the porous
building materials. Due to the hydrophilic behaviour of these
materials water is absorbed in small pores. The moisture
balance equation expresses the equilibrium between moisture
storage and the moisture transport and is given in equation
(1). The left hand side of this equation represents the storage
term while the right hand side gives the diffusion term. To
simulate the drying of a porous material this equation needs to
be solved.
⎛ ⎞ ⎛ ⎞
air ∇γ ⎟ ⇔ C ( γ ) X ( γ ) ∂γ = ∇. ⎜ ρ
∂u D D
= ∇. ⎜ ρ air ∇γ ⎟ (1)
∂t ⎜
⎝
air µ (γ ) ⎟
⎠
∂t ⎜
⎝
air µ (γ ) ⎟
⎠
In this equation u stands for the moisture content (kg/m³),
ρair for the air density (kg/m³), Dair for the vapour diffusion
coefficient (m²/s), µ for the vapour resistance factor (-), γ is
the mass fraction of vapour in air (kg/kg), C the hygroscopic
moisture capacity (kg/m³) and X the derivative of relative
humidity to the mass fraction of vapour. The properties
specific for one material are the hygroscopic moisture
capacity and the vapour resistance factor. The accuracy of the
drying simulation strongly depends on how accurate these two
parameters can be modelled.
C. Modelling the material properties
Both the hygroscopic moisture capacity (which expresses
the increase in moisture content for a given increase in
relative humidity) as the vapour resistance factor (which
expresses how much lower the diffusion in the material is
compared with diffusion in air) depend on the relative
humidity in the material. The modelling of the vapour
resistance factor is straightforward as there is a direct link clearly visible as well as its effect on the surface layer of the
with the relative humidity. Yet for a lot of porous materials no material.
direct relationship exists between the hygroscopic moisture
capacity and the relative humidity. This is caused by
hysteresis in the relation between the moisture content and the
relative humidity in the material: as small pores can block the
entrance to larger pores the material can behave differently
during adsorption (all pores are accessible) than during
desorption (some pores are blocked). To take this effect into
account in the simulations the Mualem hysteresis model is
used [1].
In this hysteresis model adsorption and desorption can be
schematically represented in a two-dimensional f-a space. The
f abscissa gives the possible adsorption sites, while the
ordinate represents the accessibility to the sorption sites.
Integration in the f-a space makes it possible to calculate the Figure 2 Relative humidity distribution in the air (Y>0) and the
moisture content by multiplying the filled sorption sites with material (Y<0) for the benchmark experiment
their accessibility. The f-function for the filled sorption sites
The simulations are performed with and without hysteresis
can be determined out of measurements of the main
model. Figure 3 shows that the agreement between both
adsorption curve while the a-function needs to be determined
simulations and the experiment is very good during
out of main adsorption and main desorption data. Figure 1
adsorption. During this period the sorption mechanism is
gives an example of the Mualem space for main adsorption
primary adsorption hence the hysteresis model does not
and for primary desorption.
influence the simulation. During desorption the importance of
the hysteresis model becomes clear. The agreement with the
experiments is not as good as during desorption yet the error
is significantly reduced compared with the simulation without
hysteresis model.

Ф1
ψ
ψ 70

65

60
a) b)
φ a φ a 55
1 1
rh (%)

50

45

ψ 40

35
f f

0 ψ 1 φ 0 ψ Ф1 1 φ 30
0 10 20 30 40 50 60

Figure 1 Example of Mualem space for a) main adsorption b) tim e (h)

primary desorption
III. VALIDATION
The coupled CFD-porous material model presented in this
paper still needs validation. To this end an experiment for the
benchmarking of porous material moisture models is
simulated [2]. In this experiment conditioned air is blown
over a porous material placed in a tunnel. The conditions of
the airflow are well controlled and accurately measured. A
step is imposed to the relative humidity of the air and inside
the porous material the relative humidity is measured at two
different depths. This data is used to compare the simulation
results with the experiment.
The coupled model is used to simulate the air flow as well
as the moisture transport in the material. Figure 2 gives an
example of the simulated relative humidity distribution in the
air and the porous material. The boundary layer in the air is
Figure 3 Evolution of the relative humidity 12.5mm deep in the
porous material. Experiment (____), simulation with hysteresis
model (_ _ _) and simulation without hysteresis model (...)
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper a coupled model for the simulation of moisture
transport in air and porous materials is presented. The model
includes the effect of hysteresis of the material properties.
Validation of the model proves its capability of accurately
predicting the drying progress of porous materials.
REFERENCES
[1] Y Mualem, A conceptual model of hysteresis, Water Resources
research, vol.10 nr. 3, 1974
[2] IEA annex 41, Whole Building Heat, Air and Moisture response