TY - GEN A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph A1 - Klewe, Tim ED - Rizzo, P. ED - Milazzo, A. T1 - Hygrometric Moisture Measurements Based on Embedded Sensors to Determine the Mass of Moisture in Porous Building Materials and Layered Structures T2 - Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering: European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring N2 - Subfloors are layered structures, consisting largely of porous building materials, such as screed. They are often suffering damage from tap water leakage, which is a typical problem in buildings, and which has largely contributed to repair costs of almost 3 billion Euro in 2018 alone in Germany. In this context, especially mould plays a role, which is both destroying the structure and posing severe health risks. To determine the damaging effects of moisture, it is necessary to know the respective processes occurring in building materials, especially to quantify the amount of moisture and its progress in the material. In this study, humidity sensors are used to derive the material moisture experimentally. Capacitive sensors recording the relative humidity are embedded into the screed and in the insulation materials such as expanded polystyrene, extruded polystyrene, perlite and glass wool. For the application in screed, the sensors need to be shielded against the aggressive alkaline materials. To ensure an appropriate exchange with the environment, a permeable membrane is requested. Different membrane materials have been investigated regarding their robustness and their permeability. In the first experimental setup, two humidity sensor arrays with seven individual sensors are embedded in homogeneous screed samples. The measured corresponding relative humidity of the screed is converted to the material moisture based on the approach of Hillerborg. In a second experimental setup, a layered structure of a complete subfloor is built in a box of 0.8 m times 0.8 m. The humidity sensors are positioned in the different insulation materials of various thicknesses. By adding water, leakage damage is simulated and its progress and effect is investigated experimentally. The investigations point at the question if the observed moisture is able to generate damage such as mould. The moisture and corresponding humidity values are discussed. It will be shown that this low-cost hygrometric approach can be used easily for moisture monitoring of screed and insulation materials as well KW - Moisture monitoring KW - Material moisture KW - Building materials KW - Embedded humidity sensors PY - 2021 DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64594-6_22 VL - 1 SP - 213 EP - 225 PB - Springer Nature CY - Cham AN - OPUS4-52013 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -