Hygroscopy of Geopolymer Materials

Abstract

Clay materials have a promising possibility of achieving high moisture buffer values and thus, of generating pleasant indoor environments. As the 3D-printing of materials has lately risen to popu- larity, clay based geopolymers are being researched for printing as well. The goal of this thesis was to experimentally find the influence of the 3D-printing process on the moisture buffer capacities of geopolymer materials by means of practical MBV determination following the Nordtest protocol. To allow for further comparisons, two other earth materials and three widely used conventional building materials were likewise subjected to the test. Unfortunately, problems with the 3D-printer made the manufacturing of the printed geopolymer samples impossible. The obtained moisture buffer values are qualitatively compared to each other and to values from literature. No general trends between earth and conventional building materials were found. Another aim was to gen- erally define a procedure to perform the Nordtest, as well as other tests in the climate chamber, within the given infrastructure of the Chair of Sustainable Construction at ETH Zurich. The resulting instruction manuals can be found in the appendix B.