During the last decades we have, via the news reporting, heard more and more about external façade fires around the world. This reporting can be said to have reached its height during the summer of 2017 with the Grenfell Tower fire in London. This incident received a great amount of media attention whereupon many actors became interested in questions related to this.

Something that many of the involved buildings have had in common has been their external façade claddings consisting of so-called aluminium composite panels. These panels consist of an insulating core between two thin sheets of aluminium. The insulating core may be constructed from combustible material, e.g. polyethylene, non-combustible material, e.g. mineral wool, or a combination of these types of material.

This project has been performed as an interview study in multiple parts where fire safety designers and professional working for a supplier of aluminium composite panels have been interviewed and fire services has responded to a questionnaire. The purpose has been to investigate which benefits and disadvantages the respondents believe are related to the use of these types of panels, as well as to investigate how the future might develop within the area.

Generally, it can be stated that the problems with the use of these panels are largely related to an absence of knowledge. The fire safety designers stress the problems related to test methods and the difficulties with quality assurance during the building process. Among the fire services, problems related to the difficulties in assessing how the façade systems are affected during a fire. This is largely due to that these panels may have vastly different properties which makes the fire services’ risk assessments uncertain.

With a basis in the result from this project it is considered that further studies should be performed. These could include a statistical review of incidents globally, as well as full scale tests of different external claddings to test different criteria.