This book addresses fire safety of combustible façade systems which has gained much attention in recent times due to several major fire accidents across the world where combustible façade systems had a significant role in enhancing the growth of fire. The Grenfell tower (London) fire is one of the most severe accident in this category. The book covers basic design and functional aspects of commonly used façade systems along with the materials typically used in such systems. Subsequently, it discusses the currently available testing methods at component level, intermediate level, and system level. It also provides detailed case studies of six full-scale real fire façade fire experiments that have been jointly carried out by IIT Gandhinagar and Underwriters Laboratories at the full-scale façade testing facility established at IIT Gandhinagar. The book will enable designers and decision makers to make better assessments regarding fire safety of existing and upcoming façade systems. Italso serves as a guide to deciding which testing methods are more appropriate under certain conditions.

Data of key characteristics such as combustion rate, ignition time, smoke production, etc. of constituents of façade systems Seven illustrated case studies of real façade fires from fully instrumented experiments. These will involve photographs, time-temperature graphs, annotated timelines of events and post-fire investigation studies Discussion of findings of the experiments with respect to existing standard testing procedures highlighting their limitations

Autorentext

Srinivasan Chandrasekaran is a faculty member of the Department of Ocean Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. He has 23 years of teaching, research and industrial experience, in the course of which he has supervised many sponsored research projects and offshore consultancy assignments both in India and abroad. His current areas of research are the dynamic analysis and design of offshore platforms, development of geometric forms of compliant offshore structures for ultra-deep water oil exploration and production, sub-sea engineering, rehabilitation and retrofitting of offshore platforms, structural health monitoring of ocean structures, seismic analysis and design of structures, and risk analyses and reliability studies for offshore and petroleum engineering plants. He has also been a visiting fellow at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy for a period of two years, during which he conducted research on the advanced nonlinear modeling and analysis of structures under different environment loads with experimental verifications. He has published 110 research papers in international journals and refereed conferences organized by professional societies around the world. He has also authored three textbooks that are highly popular among graduate students of civil and ocean engineering. He is a member of many national and international professional bodies and has delivered invited lectures and keynote addresses at various international conferences, workshops, and seminars organized in India and abroad. Gaurav Srivastava is a faculty member in the Discipline of Civil Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar since 2013. His main area of research is design and analysis of structural systems and building façades subjected to fire. His research group has been involved in development of efficient structural fire analysis algorithms for reinforced concrete and steel structures and experimental characterization of structural materials at high temperatures. He is also carrying out full-scale characterization of building façade systems subjected to fire in the unique façade testing facility that has been developed at IIT Gandhinagar. Other areas of his interest include computational mechanics and uncertainty quantification. Before joining IIT Gandhinagar, he worked at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Notre Dame as a postdoctoral research associate towards simulation of combustion of solid rocket propellant. Prior to that, he completed his doctoral and masters degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota and bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from IIT-BHU, Varanasi.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Aspects of Design of Façade Systems.- Materials Used and their Properties.- Rationale of Existing Test Methods.- Detailed Case Studies of Full-scale Experiments.- Summary and Future Directions.