摘要
Moisture in insulation materials will impair their thermal and acoustic performance, induce microbe growth, and cause equipment/material corrosion. Moisture content measurement is vital to the effective moisture control. This investigation proposes a simple, fast, and accurate method to measure moisture content of insulation materials through matching the measured temperature rise. Since moisture content corresponds to unique thermophysical properties, the measured temperature rise varies with moisture content. During the data analysis, all possible volumetric heat capacities and thermal conductivities are enumerated to match the measured temperature rise based on the composite heat conduction theory. Then, the partial derivatives with respect to both volumetric heat capacity and thermal conductivity are evaluated, so that these partial derivatives will be guaranteed equaling to zero at the optimal solutions to the moisture content. Compared to the benchmarked gravimetric method, this proposed method was found having a better accuracy but requiring a short test time.
