Façade Safety and ensures safety for its occupants. However, current conventional façade inspection is time, labour, and costintensive.
Fire-safety measures in a high-rise building
between floor construction of the facility and the façade, breakages, half-done works, and in some cases, damage to completed works. According to the installation contractors, coordinating the installation works with other trade contractors’ activities remains the most significant hurdle and a challenge. Performance safety parameters of highrise building façades are a complex problem. Therefore, the prescriptive of just design or manufacturing being correct is not sufficient to ensure a proper building level performance and especially fire safety level. Façade inspection is an integral part of installation quality as it helps to verify the integrity of the structure
With technological advancement and changing facets of how we execute projects, I truly believe there will be more and more intelligence in the façades to manage and optimise. A significant share of the added value during execution and on-site audits of the façades will be through artificial intelligence and how the various workflows and sequences are implemented at the site. If done correctly, we will be able to provide the entire solution, which is compliant with the design intent. Next-generation smart façade inspection drones: The drones with high-resolution visual and thermal cameras can accurately scan the interior and exterior of buildings. These images can be compared with numerous pre-defined photos / stored in a computer program. Through Artificial Intelligence, the alarms can be generated if the current installation is not as per drawings
or design intent, or the execution quality doesn’t comply with set acceptance criteria. This technological advancement may not substitute the interface of human audit, but it can help to reach all locations where works are in progress. Developed by TUV SUD and partners and other start-ups outside India may make such inspections easy and drive the vendors to attain the next level of quality audits. This service caters to building operators and owners of large highrise buildings and helps construction companies to ensure façade quality and monitor the construction progress of their projects. Inspection levels can be based on: • • • •
The drone-based close level inspections will throw up comparing criteria around: •
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Next-generation smart façade inspection drones
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WFM | MAY - JUNE 2022
Type of façade and material used Type of installation checks How tall the building is Performance and tolerance guidelines
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Material used if integrated with frameworks like SAP, Autodesk software, etc. Installation checks followed at the site Installation tests were done at site and records around the same with incamera recoding Corroborating installation with the design intent Any avenue of water infiltration, gaps between various materials, cracks, splits into joint sealants, missing pieces like flashing, fasteners, gaskets, etc. Loose, missing, or cracked structural element to which façade is anchored to Breakages, cracks of interior and exterior
