In situ determination of the moisture buffering potential of room enclosures

Moisture buffering by the room enclosure can have an important influence on the variation in interior relative humidity. A characterisation to qualify and quantify this moisture buffering effect is given in a complementary paper (Janssen and Roels, 2009a, 2009b). Starting from this methodology, this paper proposes a method to determine the hygric inertia of an entire room in situ. To do so, a humidifier is placed in the room and a moisture production scheme is imposed over an interval of some days. The moisture buffer capacity is determined inversely from the resulting variations in interior relative humidity.  The methodology is validated in well controlled climatic chamber experiments and afterwards applied to a real room.