Unsaturated liquid water transfer is usually described by the well known Darcy law. The practical application of the Darcy law is mostly limited to the study of water transfer in isotropic and homogeneous porous media. Most porous materials, however, are strongly heterogeneous and anisotropic. In this paper, we present a technique to model unsaturated moisture transport in heterogeneous porous media. The heterogeneous material analysed is Savonnières: a French layered oolithic limestone. Due to the complex micro-structure of the material the moisture permeability can not uniquely be determined based on indirect measurement data. To overcome this problem we use an upscaling technique, starting from the mesolevel. Modelling moisture transport on the mesoscale allows to determine an effective macroscopic permeability based on the geometric configuration and the permeability of the composing constituents. The method is validated by one- and two-dimensional simulations of free uptake experiments.

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