Study of fire behaviour of facade mock-ups equipped with aluminium composite material-based claddings, using intermediate-scale test method

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. This publication presents facade 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 facade 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.