Contribution to analytical and numerical study of combined heat and moisture transfers in porous building materials

In this paper, one-dimensional model for evaluating coupled heat and moisture transfer in porous building materials was proposed. The transient partial differential equations system was solved analytically for Dirichlet boundary conditions. It consists first to introduce the Laplace transformation and then to use the potential function technique. This approach allows simplifying the initial mathematical problem to a fourth order ordinary differential equation which can be easily solved. This solution was used to assess the transient temperature and moisture distribution across materials. A comparison with numerical models from Luikov [2] and Vafai et al. [12] was performed, a good agreement was obtained.