Summary
The fire behaviour of a building façade is dependent on the overall system's performance, rather than the performance of the individual components. A façade system includes the cladding and the insulant's characteristics, but also the cavities, cavity barriers, mounting and fixings, substrate, and any singularities, such as window frames. This publication presents façade fire propagation test according to the ISO 13785‐1 standard, with additional heat release rate and gases analysis using FTIR. Tests have been performed on 9 different compositions of aluminium composite panels (ACM) with several insulants. For tested compositions, the cladding is the most important parameter driving global fire behaviour of façade mock‐ups. ACM‐PE‐based cladding systems gave very different results from the other solutions tested. This was especially visible in heat release rates, where fire intensity was very high, whatever the insulant used in the system. The contribution of the insulant was only remarkable in these tests during the decay phase. The cavity barrier was largely ineffectual in the 3 tests with ACM‐PE cladding, as the integrity of the cavity was not ensured.
Several attempts have been made in the past to develop a European harmonized testing and assessment method for façades before the European commission decided to publish a call for tender on the topic. A project consortium from five countries (Sweden, UK, France, Germany and Hungary) applied to the call for tender and was contracted to develop a European approach to assess the fire performance of façades. 24 sub-contractors and 14 stakeholder entities were part of the project. The objective of the European project was to address a request from the Standing Committee of Construction (SCC) to provide EC Member States regulators with a means to regulate the fire performance of façade systems based on a European approach agreed by SCC. The initial stages of this project were focused on establishing a register of the regulatory requirements in all Member States in relation to the fire performance of façade systems, and to identify those Member States who have regulatory requirements for the fire performance façade systems which go beyond the current EN 13501 (reaction to fire and fire resistance) classification systems and to collate the details of these additional requirements. After having confirmed the regulatory needs a testing and classification methodology based on BS 8414 and DIN 4102-20 was developed to address the identified key performance and classification characteristics. This paper is a short overview of results the two-year development work, which Final Report published by the European Commission in 2018.
This article addresses the development of a bench-scale test (jetfire lab) mimicking the fire exposure of the large-scale jetfire facility. An experimental approach was addressed to develop direct correlation and to validate the similitude between bench-scale test and large-scale jetfire. Comparisons were made by testing Zaltex passive fire protection material in the form of panels. Novel setups were designed to make the jetfire lab able to measure time/temperature curves similar to those obtained at a large scale. The assembly of the tested samples was also investigated. An experimental protocol was elaborated to consider the junction between parts of the sample at the reduced scale. Direct correlation was found between the large and the bench scale and it was evidenced that jetfire lab can be used for preliminary study and development of new thermal barriers for fire protection.
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