Sustainable Architecture for Fire safety and Evaluation of Facades – SAFE-FACADE

The densification of urban centres and the development of highly energy-efficiency buildings are leading to the emergence of new construction systems of high-rise residential or commercial buildings, which often include external thermal insulation. However, the use of such facade raises questions about the risk of facade fire.
Therefore, an important issue is to understand the fire behaviour and to improve the fire resistance of the facade system. For this purpose, the present work proposes to develop an innovative multi-scale method based on large and laboratory-scale experiments supported by numerical modelling to better understand the fire behaviour of new facade systems and to propose fire safe constructions.
Particular attention will be paid to the fire behaviour (notably spread) of ventilated facade and to the effect of different fire barriers regulated by the British standard BS?8414 and the European standard test EN?ISO?13785-1. In particular, the use of passive elements such as metal strips or active materials such as intumescent fire stoppers will be studied with a focus on system assembly and material aging which are not currently addressed by standards.
The present project is supported by a consortium of 4 partners, two academic laboratories, Pprime Institute and LEMTA and two industrials, Saint Gobain and Efectis.
In order to meet these objectives, the project is composed of 5 work packages. From large-scale tests, the aim is to identify the key parameters of the fire behaviour of facades, then carry out medium-scale laboratory tests reproducing these parameters, numerical simulations in order to optimize new constructive solutions, and finally, to validate them on a large scale.