When designing building products and systems, engineers and technicians envisage that they provide certain technical specifications and design the systems accordingly.
More precisely, material and engineering designs are made in order to provide the technical specifications envisaged for building products. In design, engineers make material selection and dimension the products according to the materials they choose. Companies also produce products in different designs in order to differentiate their product ranges or to differentiate their products due to intellectual property rights. The reason for different design may sometimes be to make a more economical design in system optimisation. The parameters taken into account in the design may be different from the actual situation. In other words, some parameters that we do not foresee in the design may be present in real conditions. This may result in the failure of the designed and manufactured building product under actual loads at an order of magnitude lower than expected. Any failure is a professional event that engineers never want to encounter. The failure of materials and structural products should not be considered only as failure under mechanical loads. The gradual weakening of material performance under durability effects and the decrease in its resistance to mechanical effects over time will ultimately result in a collapse.
In addition to all these, the fact that building products produced for different purposes cannot provide the expected performance is also a failure for the material. Apart from structural strength and stability, thermal conductivity, acoustic conductivity and fire performance can be given as examples. For example, if the performance of a material or system produced with the claim that its thermal conductivity is below a certain value is worse than the predicted thermal insulation, the predicted thermal performance will not be achieved in the structure. Accordingly, energy consumption will be higher than foreseen. Similarly, acoustic performance can also be evaluated. If the performance of an acoustic insulation material is worse than the predicted value, sound transmission will be provided between the spaces. Thus, the project in which the material is applied will fail and the work done will be wasted. This material will then need to be supplemented. In the worst case scenario, the applied sound insulation material will have to be removed and replaced with a new one. The most feared situation should be that the fire performance is different from that envisaged in the project. If the performance of the systems in the building is different from the projected one, it may cause loss of life in the building when the fire situation, which will usually never happen to a building during its lifetime, occurs in the building. In fact, the danger in the case of fire resistance and the danger in the case of mechanical strength and stability are similar.
The performance requirements listed above are determined according to the places where the materials and building systems will be used in the building and their intended use. Accordingly, whether the criteria considered by design engineers in design are realistic or not is determined by laboratory tests. Generally, issues that are overlooked in theoretical approaches are identified in experimental studies. Materials are redesigned and tested by eliminating these deficiencies. The use of the material that provides the predicted performance is approved as a result of the tests. The test laboratory must be accredited in accordance with ISO IEC 17025 in the field where the test is applied. Otherwise, the reliability of the tests and the laboratory is questioned as the tests performed by the test institution are not audited by third parties. You can find our blog post on this subject in our next posts.
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