Open Access

ARTICLE

Modeling Water Adsorption and Retention of Building Materials From Pore Size Distribution

by Abdelkrim Trabelsi¹, Zakaria Slimani¹, Akli Younsi², Joseph Virgone¹, Rafik Belarbi²

1 Univ Lyon, CNRS, INSA-Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CETHIL UMR5008, F-69621, Villeurbanne, France.
2 University of La Rochelle, CNRS, LaSIE, UMR-7356, Avenue Michel Crépeau, 17042 La Rochelle Cedex 1, France.

*Corresponding Author: Abdelkrim Trabelsi. Email: .

Journal of Renewable Materials 2019, 7(6), 547-556. https://doi.org/10.32604/jrm.2019.04426

Abstract

Water adsorption and capillarity are key phenomena involved during heat and moisture transfer in porous building materials. They account for interaction between solid matrix, liquid water and moist air. They are considered through Water Vapor Adsorption Isotherm (WVAI) and Retention Curve (RC) functions which are constitutive laws characterizing water activity within a porous medium. The objective of this paper is to present a water vapor adsorption and retention models built from multimodal Pore Size Distribution Function (PSDF) and to see how its parameters modify moisture storage for hygroscopic and near saturation ranges. The microstructure of the porous medium is represented statistically by a bundle of tortuous parallel pores through its PSDF. Firstly, the influence of contact angle and temperature on storage properties were investigated. Secondly, a parametric study was performed to see the influence of the PSDF shape on storage properties. Three cases were studied considering the number of modalities, the weight of each modality and the dispersion around mean radius. Finally, as a validation, the proposed model for WVAI were compared to existing model from literature showing a good agreement. This study showed that the proposed models are capable to reproduce various shapes of storage functions. It also highlighted the link between microstructure and adsorption-retention phenomena.

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Keywords

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