Moisture phenomena in whole building performance prediction

This chapter focuses on modelling aspects of some important moisture phenomena in whole building simulations. The term ‘whole building’ refers to the outside environment of buildings (microclimate), the building envelope and the indoor environment of buildings. In particular, this chapter treats computational modelling of moisture buffering in rooms, computational modelling of wind-driven rain and computational modelling of convective heat and moisture transfer at exterior building surfaces. The chapter is primarily oriented to the deterioration of building materials due to high variations of relative humidity or wind-driven rain. However, the methodology and computational models can be extended to analyse the effect of moisture on other issues like energy consumption in buildings, hygrothermal comfort, indoor air quality and the reduction of active cooling in urban heat islands by means of evaporative cooling