CladFire Project
A library of fire tests of different combinations of products has been created by engineers at Design Fire Consultants Ltd in conjunction with researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Fire Research Centre.
The Grenfell Tower fire resulted in 72 deaths, and precipitated a building safety crisis within the United Kingdom. For many buildings, remedial works were deemed as being required to achieve an adequate level of safety. However, identifying which buildings should be remediated – and to what extent – is a highly subjective process.
Partly because of the historical reliance on guidance such as ADB and BR 135, there are implicit challenges with contextualising the hazard associated with potential fire spread via external walls:
- Methodology: There is no recognised methodology for determining the spread hazard (e.g. there is no means of calculating the potential rate or extent of fire or smoke spread for external wall constructions as systems).
- Data: Testing has focused on ‘pass/fail’ acceptance criteria, and as such, there is little data available to allow quantification of the spread hazard. Indeed, there is little data to allow any form of contextualising the spread hazard.
- Defects: Tests such as BS 8414 have typically been conducted for systems that have been installed correctly (i.e. without any defects), and as such, there is little knowledge or data on the impact that defects might have on the spread hazard.
- Acceptance Criteria: Even if the spread hazard of systems could be ranked relative to each other, there is no recognised acceptance criteria of what constitutes a sufficiently low hazard or risk. This is not solved by ADB because it does not include any metric or basis against which its guidance is considered to achieve a reasonable standard of health and safety.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 report highlighted the need for practitioners to have access to a body of information – “such as data from tests on product and materials”. The Inquiry recommended that the construction regulator sponsor development of such a “library”.
Engineers at Design Fire Consultants Ltd and researchers at The University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Fire Research Centre (EFRC) have worked together to:
- Undertake a series of tests on a wide array of candidate ventilated rainscreen cladding assemblies;
- Analyse and present the results; and
- Show how the data might be used to contextualise the potential fire spread hazard.
The outputs from this project are available on this website and in the following three reports:
Report 1: CladFire Project - Methodology
Report 2: CladFire Project - Results and Analysis
Report 3: CladFire Project - Possible ways to use the Data
Click the play button to watch our video