IS THE CLADDING ON MY BUILDING SAFE?

Read what experts have to say to keep your building safe

In low-rise buildings, the roof and intermediate floors are supported by the outside walls. However, in high-rise buildings, the floor slabs and ultimately the roof is supported by systems of columns. The outer walls are hung off the slabs (hence ‘curtain walls’) to form an interconnected network which has to resist wind loads and to “keep the weather out and the people in”, as we like to say.

In one sense the curtain wall is the building cladding, but ‘cladding’ also refers to the covering of a construction element, such as a column, for example, to give it a finished appearance. By extension, it can also be the open areas between the glass in many buildings. Around 2005 or so, an inexpensive, architecturally pleasing and easily worked material started to be used for those areas; it is called ACP – aluminium composite panel.

ACP is usually 4 or 6mm thick with two thin skins of aluminium, sandwiching a core material. Unfortunately, this product came on the scene during a massive construction boom. As a result, it was placed on many buildings around the world before anyone realised that it had a serious flaw – the core material then being used could catch fire under certain conditions. Surprisingly, that early ACP is relatively hard to ignite initially, even though it can mushroom into a serious cladding fire.

Over the course of time different and safer materials have been substituted for the original core. How do we know they are safer – because we test them following international standards in our Fire Testing laboratory in Dubai. Can we do the same for your building? Yes. Samples of cladding can be removed from the building, and these are sufficient for small-scale and inexpensive tests which can determine the characteristics of the core.