Finding the Generic Hygrothermal Properties of Historical Bricks by Supervised Agglomerative Clustering

Abstract

Finding the generic hygrothermal properties of historical brick for application in Heat Air and Moisture (HAM) simulation programs such as Delphin, Wufi, etc., is the main objective of this paper. In this paper hygrothermal properties and Delphin simulation results of 40 different historical brick samples from the 17th to 20th Century, were used. The clustering results of hygrothermal properties were cross-examined with the results of clustering results of Delphin simulation data. Six and three clusters were found to be optimal, accordingly for Hygrothermal properties and Delphin results data groups. After cross-examination, a total of 9 combined clusters were recognized, with two dominant clusters containing 67.5 % of all samples (30 and 37.5 %), four of the clusters had only one sample in them, and other clusters had two, three, and four samples in them. Additionally, all the resulting clusters were compared with the brick sample groups that were created based on the description of the brick: color, material type, and year of manufacturing.

Keywords

• agglomerative
• brick
• clustering
• delphin
• generic
• historical
• hygrothermal
• properties
• supervised