Physical modeling of heat and moisture transfer in wet bio-sourced insulating materials.

Simultaneous heat and moisture transfers in bio-sourced insulating materials are significant phenomena in thermal metrology. The present study focuses on these phenomena by experimental and numerical approaches based on the asymmetric hot-plate method. In this paper, a bio-sourced insulating material based on flax fibers is developed. The thermal and hygric properties of the sample are then investigated in the humid atmosphere. The temperature is maintained at 30 °C, and the relative humidity varies between 30% and 90% RH. A physics-based model of simultaneous heat and moisture transfer is developed for thermal conductivity estimation. This model is discretized with finite difference method…