Identification of the hygrothermal properties of a building envelope material by the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy

Abstract

This paper proposes the application of the covariance matrix adaptation (CMA) evolution strategy for the identification of building envelope materials hygrothermal properties. All material properties are estimated on the basis of local temperature and relative humidity measurements, by solving the inverse heat and moisture transfer problem. The applicability of the identification procedure is demonstrated in two stages: first, a numerical benchmark is developed and used as to show the potential identification accuracy, justify the choice for a Tikhonov regularization term in the fitness evaluation, and propose a method for its appropriate tuning. Then, the procedure is applied on the basis of experimental measurements from an instrumented test cell, and compared to the experimental characterization of the observed material. Results show that an accurate estimation of all hygrothermal properties of a building material is feasible, if the objective function of the inverse problem is carefully defined.

Keywords:

• identification
• evolutionary algorithm
• CMA
• heat and moisture transfer
• modelling

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the ANR for supporting this project, which allowed further developments such as presented here.

Notes

1. hamopy: HAM transfer in Python https://code.google.com/p/hamopy/.

2. Distributed EAs in Python .

3. Scalable COncurrent Operations in Python http://code.google.com/p/scoop/.

Additional information

Funding

This work uses experimental records that were gathered in the scope of the HYGROBAT project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR).