Published works

Recent high-profile building fires involving highly-combustible external cladding panels inAustralia as well as Dubai, China, and the United Kingdom have created a heightened awareness bythe public, government, and commercial entities to act on the risks associated with non-compliantbuilding structures. In this paper, a database of fire events involving combustible aluminiumcomposite panels was developed based on (i) review of relevant major fire events in Australia andother countries, and (ii) numerical simulation of the ignitability, fire spread, and toxic emissionsassociated with composite panels. Through the application of large-eddy-simulation (LES)-basedcomputational fire field models, the associated risks for a standardized two-storey building withexternal cladding was considered in this study. A total of sixteen simulation cases with differentinitial sizes of the fire and different air cavity widths in the exterior cladding assembly were examinedto investigate the tolerable situations and their influences. It was discovered that for most cases,with an initial fire size greater than 400 kW/m−2, the fire will spread from the first to second floorbefore the allowed egress time period.Key