Abstract
Coated concrete panels (PC panel) are effective construction. A coating on the panels generally needs a quality management process, such as water content inspection and the application of good performance coatings, in order to prevent blister due to high moisture contents. Nonetheless, the blister prevention effect is often evaluated by only the observation of blister presence on specimens using concrete panels with high moisture contents, and thus far not quantitatively envisaged. This study aims to show fundamental quantitative knowledge to evaluate the blister prevention effects, and hence performed a transient heat and moisture transfer simulation to numerically investigate pressure in pores of concrete walls. The simulated pressure is similar amplitude with the measured data in a previous study. It is also revealed that pressure changes are not mainly generated by capillary, but vapor flows in the pores. The higher the moisture contents are, the higher the pressure is. The maximum pressure is not varied regardless of the variation of the initial moisture contents. However, when a typical normal concrete and light weight concrete are compared on an identical time series, it presented that the pressure changes in the light weight concrete with a high moisture content are higher than one in the normal concrete by a factor of 2-5.
