The Impact of Using Nanotechnology in Building Envelope Materials on Firefighting in High-rise Buildings

Abstract

High-rise buildings are a trend in buildings recently as their number is at a rapid increase until this year. And they started to be applied in developing countries like Egypt so we need to focus and study the problems faced by them all over the world and look for a solution to these problems. Nowadays High-rise buildings’ fires due to envelope material have been a noteworthy problem that attracts a lot of media attention due to their high risk and losses among people and property. These fire cases still occur until this year as Abbco Tower in Sharjah, and Business Centre in Ankara, and Madrid tower in Madrid. This thesis aims to study the components of the different façade typologies to pick out the combustible traditional thermal insulating materials as well as cladding materials. Then by studying some nano-additives, paints, coatings, and thermal insulating materials, they can be used as alternatives for the traditional materials after making a comparison between their fire performance and the traditional envelope materials’ to improve the building envelope fire performance. To obtain the thesis's main objective, three methods will be used; first, a literature review will be used to gather data on fire cases in high-rise buildings, existing building envelope materials, and their fire performance in some case studies and this method will be applied in chapter one. Second, analytical studies are divided as follows; into qualitative analysis to help in getting new Nanomaterial additives, paints, coatings, and thermal insulations to be an alternative for the existing building envelope materials. Then comparative analysis to help in comparing different materials and then applying some development or replacing the existing ones to reach the best performance against fire using SP 105 fire test as a tool and this method will be applied in chapters two and three. Third, simulation method to make a comparison between the fire performance of the existing envelope materials and nano-alternatives by applying SP 105 fire test which was used to judge the validity to use these materials in high-rise buildings’ façade by using pyrosim software (version 2019.3.1204, 2002-2020 copyright) as an interface for Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) to help to build the model, testing these materials as well as giving graphical results. While smokeview (version 6.7.7) was used for viewing the results of the realistic simulation and this method will be applied in chapter four.