Improving the fire performance of high-rise buildings' façade with nano-thermal insulating materials

Abstract EN

Nowadays High-rise buildings' fires due to façade materials have been a noteworthy problem which attracts a lot of media attention due to their high risk and losses among people and property.

These fire cases still occur until this year as Abbco Tower in Sharjah, and Business Centre in Ankara and Madrid tower in Madrid.

One of these materials which caused fire spreading along the façade is the usage of combustible traditional thermal insulating materials.

But nanotechnology offers insulation materials with better thermal conductivity that may be a good alternative for the existing thermal insulating materials.

The objective of this paper is to study the performance of the most famous traditional and Nano-thermal insulating materials in order to reach better thermal insulating material to improve the façade fire performance according to SP105 fire test.

To obtain this objective, SP105 fire test criteria was used to judge the validity to use these materials in high-rise buildings' facade, pyrosim software and smokeview to help in modeling and viewing the results.

This paper concluded that the Nano-thermal insulating materials can provide the façade with better fire performance as they passed the SP 105 test criteria.

But this paper recommends applying this large-scale test on site and studying other points on the performance of these materials to get internationally certified and also try to found a way to decrease these materials' cost.