Moon, H: Assessing Mold Risks in Buildings under Uncertainty

In many cases, microbial growth in buildings involves local, situational, and sometimes idiosyncratic aspects of a building during its operation. These unexpected behaviors cannot be captured by current deterministic performance evaluation methods. Hence, a new probabilistic performance indicator for mold growth risk is developed by treating mold as a risk and a limit state phenomenon. This new approach requires a reliable aggregation method to arrive at quantified mold growth risk and the extension of standard simulation capacity to account for additional mechanisms of the mold phenomenon. It also implicates uncertainty in building parameters, including natural variation of hygrothermal properties in building materials, deviation between as-ed values, and the actual in-use values of the parameters. This new approach is capable of explaining unexpected and non-deterministic mold growth occurrences. Moreover, it identifies the parameters that have dominant effects on the increase in mold risk.