ABSTRACT
The buffering of indoor humidity fluctuations can lead to more hygienic and comfortable conditions in residential buildings. In order to quantify the hygric buffering capacity of wood based wall and ceiling panels under realistic and well-defined boundary conditions, two identical test rooms were set-up. Both rooms have a door and a window and an inert PVC floor covering. One room serves as test room and the other as reference room. The walls and ceiling of the reference room are covered with a traditional interior plaster coated with a vapour permeable (sd = 0.15 m) film of paint. The interior plaster of the test room is completely covered by aluminum foil. Both rooms are equipped with temperature and humidity sensors, calibrated ventilation systems and vapour production apparatuses. While temperature set-points, ventilation and moisture production rate are well defined, the exterior climate conditions cannot be controlled. Therefore, only comparative test can give reliable results. All investigations were done by measuring the indoor humidity in both rooms simultaneously. While different wood based panels or wall systems were set-up in the non hygroscopic test room, the reference room was left empty all times. The humidity fluctuations resulting from a specific vapour production pattern in the test room were compared to those in the reference room under identical boundary conditions. The relative dampening of the humidity fluctuations is considered to be a measure of the moisture buffering capacity of the interior panelling. The testing equipment and a summary of the results will be presented.
