Review of techniques for identifying the chemical composition of Aluminium Composite Cladding cores

The Grenfell disaster of June 14, 2017 brought into sharp focus the dangers posed by combustible façade materials. Polyethylene core panelling has been implicated in numerous fires such as The Address Downtown, the Saif Belhasa in Dubai and the Lacrosse building in Melbourne. Due to the large number of buildings with potentially combustible cladding, there is significant pressure to find an accurate and fast method to identify such cladding and any associated insulation as part of the overall assessment process. Over the past year, several different approaches to identification have been proposed and in this paper, we recount our expe-riences in developing a methodology to achieve this and discuss the limitations of this method and of competing methods.