Free of Volatile Organic Compounds Protection against Moisture in Building Materials/Zabezpieczenia Przegród Budowlanych Przed Wilgocią Wolne Od Lotnych Związków Organicznych

The article presents information about moisture protection of building materials. The discussed parameters determining the efficiency of the water protection are material porosity, water absorptivity and surface condition of building materials. Moreover the ecological aspect of hydrophobic VOC-free preparations available on the market has been underlined. The first part of the article is a description of moisture problem in the building envelopes and the possibilities of its prevention. The special attention is put on the electric methods of moisture estimation with a special emphasis on the Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) method. The second part of the article is devoted an experiment of model red-brick walls exhibited on capillary uptake process. For the experiment three model red-brick walls were built and prepared for water uptake process. The experiment was monitored by the capacitive and surface TDR probes thanks to which the necessity of sampling and material destruction could be avoided. Conducted experiments show the progress of water uptake phenomenon in the model walls which differ in type of protection against moisture and prove the potential of the non-invasive measurements using the surface TDR probes. Basic physical parameters of the applied bricks were determined together with the reflectometric measurements. Furthermore, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) was used to analyze the hydrophobic layer continuity.