A strategy for modelling typical indoor climates in historic buildings : moisture buffering of massive walls and stratification by heating
Artworks in historical church buildings degrade due to indoor conditions that are not optimal to preserve artworks. Building Energy Simulation (BES) tools are useful and powerful tools in making decisions of different retrofitting designs to improve the indoor conditions. However, to make a more detailed assessment of the preservation conditions, it is important to take typical conditions in historical church buildings into account in the simulation model. Two of them are the buffering capacity of the heavy thick walls and the stratification during heating. Although BES-tools, based on the well mixed assumption, are adequate for the prediction of an average temperature and relative humidity in small rooms, it cannot predict detailed temperature and airflow distributions within each room. To provide a more realistic representation of thermal and hygric conditions in a church building, in this paper a simplified method is suggested to take into account the stratification during heating in combination with the moisture buffering.