Investigations of the performance of facades made of ETICS with polystyrene under external fire exposure and fire safety measures for their improvement

Exposure to flames of a fully developed room fire venting out of an external wall opening after flash-over is most commonly used as the reference fire scenario for assessing the fire performance of external wall cladding systems. This is reflected by various testing standards (e.g. ISO 13785-2 [1], E DIN 4102-20 [2]). The impact of other fire scenarios had been judged as less critical or most similar in the past. Hence, there was a widespread opinion that other scenarios were covered by these fire tests (cf. [3]). This assumption has also underlain assessment of ETICS fire performance.