Fire Safety Facade Design: The case study of an office tower in Milan

Nowadays the construction industry is characterised by high multifunctional and complex buildings with innovative façade systems. Unlike a simple prescriptive approach according to standards and codes, a performance-based design allows to define safety levels and goals, to evaluate heat transfer to the structure and the structure response based on fire behaviour, to model different fire scenarios by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software and to personalize the design according to a specific project in order to reach the required level of safety. Through a significant case study, the paper describes the performance-based design approach in the Fire Safety Engineering field (FSE). The analysis demonstrates consistent results between the CFD fire modelling output and the laboratory test results on a real scale façade mock-up. Moreover, a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) performed on a section of the façade mullion allows to identify and to highlight the façade system critical issues in different fire scenarios.