This report contains the highlights of the presentations and discussions at the NIST/Industry/Academe Workshop: Hygrothermal Effects on the Performance of Polymers and Polymeric Composites that took place on 21-22, September 1995 at the Hilton Hotel, Gaithersburg, Maryland. The workshop was organized by the Polymers Division of the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory (MSEL) at the Nati...

Review of the state-of-the-art on fungal damage of wood materials showed that a combination of period of cumulative time when moisture and thermal regimes are above specified minimum is needed for fungal activities to cause biological decay in wood. The long-term performance of a typical wall assembly was evaluated using an existing computer model of heat, moisture, and air transfer in conjunct...

High temperature vulcanised silicone rubber (SR) has excellent hydrophobicity and thus is widely applied both in indoor outdoor insulation. According to the analysis of different experimental ageing tests field investigation SR, humidity are considered be fundamental factors during degradation. Hygrothermal was proposed this study simulate chalking state finally leading irreversible degradation...

Wood shrinks during drying with the departure of bond water. Along the fibre direction, the magnitude of this shrinkage is mainly governed by the orientation of cellulose microfibrils (MF) in the cell wall. However, tension wood has an unexpectedly high longitudinal shrinkage considering the fact that MFs are oriented nearly parallel to the cell direction. This effect is thought to be due to th...

For many years, the housing environment has been acknowledged as one of the main settings that affect human health. Living and housing conditions are the basis of many factors influencing residential health. Still, to date there is no commonly agreed upon definition of ‘healthy housing’, and there are still major gaps in the knowledge on how housing conditions may affect health. Epidemiological...

As a solution of high efficiency and clean energy, fuel cell technologies, especially proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC), have caught extensive attention. However, after decades of development, the performances of PEMFCs are far from achieving the target from the Department of Energy (DOE). Thus, further understanding of the degradation mechanism is needed to overcome this obstacle. Due...

Impacts of forest fragmentation and edge effect on plant-herbivores interactions are relatively unknown, and the relationships between galling insects and their host plants are very susceptible to environmental variations. The goal of our study was to test the edge effect hypothesis for galling insects associated with Styrax pohlii (Styracaceae) host plant. Samplings were conducted at a fragmen...

Wood shrinks during drying with the departure of bond water. Along the fibre direction, the magnitude of this shrinkage is mainly governed by the orientation of cellulose microfibrils (MF) in the cell wall. However, tension wood has an unexpectedly high longitudinal shrinkage considering the fact that MFs are oriented nearly parallel to the cell direction. This effect is thought to be due to th...