Cladding product fire testing

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Ashley Hunt, CSV Executive Director: In terms of the system that is there at the moment, testing is done on an individual basis between the tester and the client, and none of that is shared either across industry or to other clients, which means it’s an opportunity missed. What Cladding Safety Victoria has been able to do is do the testing, universally share it and make sure that it is actually available on our website.

Steven Halliday, Jensen Hughes General Manager, Testing: So at the moment we’re doing some pre-test checks, so what we have in front of us you can see the white portions up either shoulder. That’s the ACP that we’re investigating. There’s a lot of dotting i’s and crossing t’s before anything really kicks off. You’ll see from the actual test, there’s no Mulligans, we can’t take anything back once we actually start the fire. So making sure the designs are representative, substitution of materials if we can’t get access to them, and baselines instrumentation requirements just make sure we capture as much as we can from single burn.

Ashley Hunt, CSV Executive Director: It’s not a simple case of walking up and flicking a match onto some particular material. The tip of the iceberg is burning itself before any test there is months of work.

Steven Halliday, Jensen Hughes General Manager, Testing: A lot of the outcomes, they are what they are. Being able to provide certainty with an outcome rather than an estimate or opinion always allows us to sleep a little bit more soundly at night.

Ashley Hunt, CSV Executive Director: So we were really lucky to actually have Professor Kate Nguyen come and join our team. She is a world recognised materials expert.

Professor Kate Nguyen, CSV Chief Engineer: I’m a Professor at RMIT University. I also lead the Innovative Fire and Façade Engineering Research Group over there. And my background is kind of interdisciplinary between materials, chemicals, civil and fire safety engineering. It has been a really great honour for me and my research group at RMIT to be involved in CSV’s program.

Ashley Hunt, CSV Executive Director: The other significant part we’ve been able to go and myth-bust effectively is the ACP-FR, which is the Flame Retardant.

Professor Kate Nguyen, CSV Chief Engineer: The composition of the cladding is quite important. The ratio between the polymer and the flame-retardant, not the filler. That is the first important key finding. The second thing that we found was that different types of cladding have different mechanism of fire spread and that is both vertically and horizontally.

Ashley Hunt, CSV Executive Director: And so if you’ve got a one-to-one ratio greater on the active materials, or the active minerals rather, the rate of fire spread and indeed the fire spread on the vertical path is significantly reduced. Such that we can actually say with very very strong confidence that this stuff, while it is combustible, it’s slow and far more tolerable in terms of its usage.

Professor Kate Nguyen, CSV Chief Engineer: Having some sort of a testing data base at this scale, I think it is really important for science, for research, and for the industry in general.

Updated 26 February 2025

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Cladding product fire testing

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