Characterization of hygrothermal properties of wood-based products – Impact of moisture content and temperature

• Study of different wood-based materials: Oriented Strand Board (OSB), wood-fibre insulation and solid spruce wood.
• Impact of moisture content and temperature on the thermal conductivity.
• Sorption and desorption isotherms.
• Influence of moisture content on vapour diffusion measured with cup method.
• Correction of surface resistance of wood-fibre insulation for vapour diffusion calculation.

This paper focuses on the results of measurements of the thermal conductivity, the vapour diffusivity and the sorption–desorption isotherms of 3 types of wood-based materials.Though disparate and showing the difficulty of studying heterogeneous, hygroscopic wood-based materials, this set of results is a good basis for future work.As the study is part of an ongoing project, these results will be confronted with those of other partners in order to compare the different methods and to bring out characteristic values for each material. These values will then supply data for numerical calculations of a set of materials under controlled conditions.