Fire prevention is a very important project in building safety design. Each area of a building must be designed with a fire protection level in accordance with building regulations. The glass components used in these areas must be equal to or higher than the required fire protection level for that area. Only in this way can flames and smoke be limited to a certain area, prevent their spread, and provide favorable conditions for extinguishing fires as soon as possible.
Glass curtain walls themselves do not have fire resistance, but as the peripheral protective structure of a building, they are a part of the overall building and an important channel for fire to spread from the outside to the inside.
Because ordinary float glass only breaks and damages in 1 minute when exposed to fire, and tempered glass only takes 5 minutes. In a curtain wall construction system composed of frames, sealing strips, and glass, the glass will explode at around 250 ℃. When the curtain wall glass bursts and falls off, flames can fly from the outer side of the curtain wall to the upper wall, burning the upper glass curtain wall and then entering the upper indoor space. Moreover, there are often gaps between vertical curtain walls and horizontal floor slabs. If left untreated or improperly treated, thick smoke, high temperature, and flames can spread upwards through these gaps when a fire starts.
Therefore, the fire protection design of glass curtain walls should also be in line with the overall fire protection requirements of the building, improve the fire resistance performance of the building's external windows and walls, in order to effectively prevent the spread of fire, reduce fire losses, and reduce casualties. Installing fire-rated glass has become an important means for high-rise buildings to prevent the spread of fires.
In China, initially due to limitations in fire-rated glass technology, fire-rated glass was mainly used in fire-rated windows, doors, and some internal fire-rated partitions. There were not many engineering projects promoting the application of fire-rated glass in glass curtain wall construction.
After more than a decade of development, the production process and product performance, especially the fire resistance, of fire-rated glass have undergone significant changes, and its role in building fire safety is becoming increasingly significant.
With the high attention paid by construction authorities to the fire safety of high-rise buildings and the improvement of people's safety awareness,fire-rated glass, as a component material of fire protection components, is gradually being widely used in construction projects. In the future, with the technological progress of fire-rated glass and the continuous decrease in production costs,fire-rated glass will have greater development and application space.