Intermediate-Scale Tests of Ventilated Facades with Aluminium-Composite Claddings

Abstract

The fire behaviour of a building facade is dependent on the overall system's performance, rather than the performance of the individual components. A facade 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. Aluminium-Composite-Materials (ACM's) are increasingly commonly used as cladding when designing building facades nowadays, but different types of cladding can achieve very different levels of performance. Assessment of a particular facade system's fire performance can be undertaken using large-scale testing such BS8414-1, but there is currently no commonly accepted method of extending the scope of a large scale tested system, to account for variances from the configuration that has been tested; it is therefore proposed that intermediate testing could allow a route for assessing the significance of different system configurations and components to extend the scope of large scale tested systems. The test protocol proposed for such intermediate level testing, is a facade fire propagation test according to the ISO 13785-1 standard, with additional heat release rate and gases analysis using FTIR. Tests results have been compared to real-scale data available to estimate measurement relevance of such intermediate-scale tests. In order to appreciate the variability of different system configurations, as well as the effect of different interactions between panels and insulants, a test campaign of 9 combinations of cladding and insulants was performed using intermediate level testing, this involved 3 different Aluminium Composite Material (ACM)-based cladding systems in combination with 3 different insulants within each system.