Numerical simulation of the fire behaviour of facade equipped with aluminium composite material-based claddings-Model validation at intermediate scale

Increasing the energy performance of buildings is a crucial sustainable development objective. However, building features, products, mounting, and fixing of facade components have a large impact on fire safety. Authors in previous study performed facade fire propagation tests according to ISO13785-1 on different combinations of ACM claddings and insulants. In this paper, simulations are performed to reproduce three of these tests. The model is validated with the aforementioned experimental results, including details in terms of thermal conditions in the system. This allows better understanding of the fire propagation on the overall system. Additional information, such as the relative contribution of the cladding and the insulant, are investigated numerically. The fire behaviour of each component of the overall system is thus validated. Simulations and tests performed show that the ACM cladding is the most important element driving the global fire behaviour of facade types considered. In particular, ACM-PE-based cladding systems show large fire propagation whatever the insulant. This series of simulations is a part of a larger study including several steps of increasing complexity. Once the model for the fire behaviour of facade system is validated at intermediate scale, larger facade systems will be investigated numerically to evaluate the influence of scaling.