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PREDICTION OF BIOFILMS COLONIZATION PROCESS USING COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING TECHNIQUE

Václav Kočí, Klára Kobetičová

Abstract

Biofilms on exterior plasters deserve an attention as they affect not only the aesthetical appearance of buildings, but also their hygric and thermal performance that can subsequently results in an initiation of degradation processes. Understanding of biofilms growth mechanisms can be therefore efficiently exploited to avoid such conditions that are convenient for their propagation. This paper therefore combines experimental and computational techniques to predict the biofilms growth rate on lime plasters when exposed to climatic conditions of two selected Central European cities. Various thermal insulations are considered to investigate their influence on the biofilms growth rate. Once a correlation between the growth rate and hygrothermal patterns is determined experimentally, the data are exploited in postprocessing of surface conditions (temperature, relative humidity) obtained using computational modelling. The results obtained have rather a comparative character as there are still some simplifications adopted, which are irrelevant when drawing a comparison between particular cases studied. It has been shown that the thermal insulation does not have a significant impact on the growth rate, wood fiberboard showed the best performance with a minimal difference, but the location of the wall assembly studied plays the key role. Within this research that considers two Czech cities, the difference in the growth rate was nearly 300%.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2021/6.1/s26.49

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