Annealed, tempered or laminated? Your choice can influence fire safety!

Johan T. Koudijs, Peter H.E. van de Leur, DGMR Bouw BV

The very first building codes were made to prevent fires from spreading through cities during the middle ages. Since that time the evolution of these regulations has been incidently driven. Some 40 years ago a more scientific approach to fire safety started in several countries around the world. Nowadays things like for instance external fire spread can be predicted by calculation models. Some of these models have already been incorporated in local and European standards. One of these models is used in Eurocode 1 describing a method to asses the fire safety of external steel structures exposed to a compartment fire. Compartment fires are influenced by the type of glass used in the windows of the compartments. This paper shows the influence of the type of glass on the development of a fire in a compartment using a model developed by Margaret Law and Turlogh O’Brien in the 70-ties. It hopefully contributes to the awareness that the choice of glass can be of influence on the fire safety of buildings. This paper does not elaborate on the behavior of glass exposed to fire.

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The Authors

Mr. Johan Koudijs Ing. DGMR Johan T. Koudijs (1960) B.Sc. qualified as a general building engineer at the polytechnic school in Utrecht (NL) in 1986. For 10 years he worked as a consultant on façade-technology for two specialize... Read more