In the context of the energy transition, new construction materials are emerging, notably bio-based materials such as wood concrete. This paper investigates the hygrothermal performance of walls constructed with wood–cement concrete. First, the thermal properties of wooden concrete, namely thermal conductivity, effusivity, and diffusivity, are experimentally characterized in both dry and wet conditions. Second, in situ measurements are carried out on a house in Lyon, a city in France, constructed with mono-layered wood–cement walls. This involves monitoring the temperature and relative humidity levels both inside and outside the building, as well as at three distinct positions within the wood walls over a 6-month period (from 20 April 2023 to 20 October 2023). The hygrothermal analysis at the center of the wall reveals that the wood wall effectively moderates fluctuations in the external temperature and relative humidity. Following this, a numerical study is performed to check the reliability of the adopted Reduced Heat, Air, and Mass (HAM) model to reproduce the hygrothermal performance of the wood–cement wall. The results show a strong agreement between the simulated and measured data, confirming the applicability of the ‘Reduced HAM’ model for the prediction of the hygrothermal behavior of wood–cement walls.

Experimental characterization of wood fracture properties raises a number of challenges: crack tip location or the application of equivalent linear elastic fracture mechanics theory to a heterogeneous and anisotropic material. This article presents the application of the Localized Spectrum Analysis, a full-field measurement method, to obtain high-resolution strain maps for the analysis of three mode I crack propagation tests on TDCB silver fir wood specimens. The strain maps presented enabled us to identify annual rings through stiffness variations, to observe internal cracks through abnormal compression zones, and to determine the material's resistance-curves, therefore its critical energy release rate. This work opens up interesting prospects for the use of new measurement methods in the characterization of wood fracture properties.

Panel paintings respond to environmental change in ways that depend on the individual object. Environmental monitoring is routine, but climatic standards do not provide a quantitative, object-specific criterion for deciding whether an observed deformation is mechanically significant. We present an open, modular pipeline—a sequence of independent, replaceable modules in which the output of each feeds the next—that converts environmental and deformometric records into a conservation-relevant quantity: strain at the painted surface. The workflow comprises four modules: calculation of cupping from deformometric-kit data, estimation of equilibrium moisture content from temperature and relative humidity, local-polynomial pre-processing, and a reduced-order hygro-mechanical model. The method is applied to three poplar panel paintings from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure exposed to the same conservation environment. The model reproduces measured cupping with training R² values of 0.90–0.95. Expressing the response as painted-surface strain reveals object-specific differences; under a conservative worst-case reference, all three paintings remain below the lower bound of the cracking-strain range reported for gesso grounds, although with different margins. Crucially, these strain levels cannot be inferred from cupping amplitude alone because the cupping-to-strain relationship varies among panels. The pipeline is not intended to replace finite-element analysis, but to provide a transparent, reproducible framework for turning routine monitoring into a physically interpretable screening metric.