The current project is centered around flat roofs, a roof type which is widely used in Austria and also very commong around the globe. The flat type of roof has proven during the last decades to be highly sensitive to moisture damage if planning and construction is not properly done. The current project contributes to filling a gap in basic building physics research. The direct positive effects are:
1. On the research side the project improves the possibilities to model large scale air flows through buildings parts. Focus is on heat and moisture. Air flowing through a flat roof as a building part serves as validation example.
2. On the business side the project helps via a new algorithm to choose the optimal time when to open a flat roof for inspection. The according works focus on a commercial sensor system of the business partner in the project. Based on the monitoring data from these sensors the total cost as resulting from investment, damage cost and repair and maintenance cost, averaged along the life time of the roof, should be reduced
Work in the project relies on laboratory experiments, experiments on flat roofs of three real buildings, one of those being a building erected on purpose for testing, and on a software-based model for hygrothermal simulation of building parts. Project partners are a research partner focused on basic research (TU Wien), a research partner focussed on applied research (IFB) and a small start-up company (BMONC, founded in 2015), which sells moisture sensors linked to the LoRaWan-network (-> "Internet of Things") and offers moisture monitoring of flat roofs as a commercial B2B-service.
Key project results are
1. on the research side a module "large scale air flows through building parts" of an existing scientific simulation software including the theoretical foundations via a doctoral thesis and at least one scientfic publication
2. on the business side an algorithm which may be used after the project's end to improve an existing online-visualisation of the (moisture) state of flat roofs
