Transient Analysis for Thermal and Moisture Behavior of Building Elements

The simultaneous flow of heat and moisture in building elements has received considerable attention in recent literature. In this paper, a transient hygrothermal problem with coupled temperature and moisture for building elements is investigated. A hybrid numerical method of Laplace transformation and the finite difference is first applied to solve its transient hygrothermal problem, in which the temperature and moisture coupling at the inner and outer surfaces is taken into account in the boundary conditions. The general solutions of the governing equations are first solved in the transform domain, and then the inversion to the real domain is completed by the methods of matrix operation and the Fourier series technique