STUDY ON PRESSURE-EQUALIZATION OF CURTAIN WALL SYSTEMS

In recent years, aluminium-curtain-wall systems are often used in sout heast Asia. Many of these curtain-wall systems can be classified as a two-barrier system with a front-panel (the rainscreen) and the back-pa nel (the air barrier). The back-panels of such systems are usually thi n and flexible. Compared with the brick or brick-veneer rainscreen wal ls, where the back-panels are very rigid, the pressure-equalization ch aracteristics are expected to be quite different. To improve on the un derstanding of the behaviour of such systems and to evaluate design pa rameters, full-scale measurements were carried out. A numerical model which takes into account the flexibility of the back-panel has been de veloped for the prediction of cavity pressure in curtain walls. The re sults based on this model show good agreement with those obtained from full-scale experiments. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.