Hygrothermal behaviour of hemp concrete; experimental evidences and modelling

This paper presents experimental hygrothermal data of an hemp concrete wall of dimensions 0.9×0.9×0.1 [m3]. The wall is instrumented with sensors to monitor temperature, relative humidity at the middle of the wall and incoming heat flows at the external surfaces. It is placed in a double climatic chamber that allows the regulation of temperature and relative humidity on each side of the wall, independently to each other. The experimental results leads to a clear identification of the coupling between the variation of the relative humidity inside the wall and its temperature. The validity of the commonly adopted assumptions for hygrothermal simulation are finally analyzed in the light of these experimental results. The material parameters used for the simulations are measured separately on decimetric samples of the same hemp concrete, which comes from the same mix and with the same apparent density