Suelen Gasparin

Suelen Gasparin, Julien Berger, Denys Dutykh et al.

Implicit schemes have been extensively used in building physics to compute the solution of moisture diffusion problems in porous materials for improving stability conditions. Nevertheless, these schemes require important sub-iterations when treating non-linear problems. To overcome this disadvantage, this paper explores the use of improved explicit schemes, such as Dufort-Frankel, Crank-Nicolson and hyperbolisation approaches. A first case study has been considered with the hypothesis of linear transfer. The Dufort-Frankel, Crank-Nicolson and hyperbolisation schemes were compared to the classical Euler explicit scheme and to a reference solution. Results have shown that the hyperbolisation scheme has a stability condition higher than the standard Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition. The error of this schemes depends on the parameter τrepresenting the hyperbolicity magnitude added into the equation. The Dufort-Frankel scheme has the advantages of being unconditionally stable and is preferable for non-linear transfer, which is the second case study. Results have shown the error is proportional to O(Δt). A modified Crank-Nicolson scheme has been proposed in order to avoid sub-iterations to treat the non-linearities at each time step. The main advantages of the Dufort-Frankel scheme are (i) to be twice faster than the Crank-Nicolson approach; (ii) to compute explicitly the solution at each time step; (iii) to be unconditionally stable and (iv) easier to parallelise on high-performance computer systems. Although the approach is unconditionally stable, the choice of the time discretisation $Δt$ remains an important issue to accurately represent the physical phenomena.

Julien Berger, Suelen Gasparin, Denys Dutykh et al.

Comparisons of experimental observation of heat and moisture transfer through porous building materials with numerical results have been presented in numerous studies reported in literature. However, some discrepancies have been observed, highlighting underestimation of sorption process and overestimation of desorption process. Some studies intend to explain the discrepancies by analysing the importance of hysteresis effects as well as carrying out sensitivity analyses on the input parameters as convective transfer coefficients. This article intends to investigate the accuracy and efficiency of the coupled solution by adding advective transfer of both heat and moisture in the physical model. In addition, the efficient Scharfetter and Gummel numerical scheme is proposed to solve the system of advection-diffusion equations, which has the advantages of being well-balanced and asymptotically preserving. Moreover, the scheme is particularly efficient in terms of accuracy and reduction of computational time when using large spatial discretisation parameters. Several linear and non-linear cases are studied to validate the method and highlight its specific features. At the end, an experimental benchmark from the literature is considered. The numerical results are compared to the experimental data for a pure diffusive model and also for the proposed model. The latter presents better agreement with the experimental data. The influence of the hysteresis effects on the moisture capacity is also studied, by adding a third differential equation.

Suelen Gasparin, Denys Dutykh, Nathan Mendes

This work presents an efficient numerical method based on spectral expansions for simulation of heat and moisture diffusive transfers through multilayered porous materials. Traditionally, by using the finite-difference approach, the problem is discretized in time and space domains (Method of lines) to obtain a large system of coupled Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), which is computationally expensive. To avoid such a cost, this paper proposes a reduced-order method that is faster and accurate, using a much smaller system of ODEs. To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, tree case studies are presented. The first one considers nonlinear heat and moisture transfer through one material layer. The second case - highly nonlinear - imposes a high moisture content gradient - simulating a rain like condition - over a two-layered domain, while the last one compares the numerical prediction against experimental data for validation purposes. Results show how the nonlinearities and the interface between materials are easily and naturally treated with the spectral reduced-order method. Concerning the reliability part, predictions show a good agreement with experimental results, which confirm robustness, calculation efficiency and high accuracy of the proposed approach for predicting the coupled heat and moisture transfer through porous materials.