Icade, PiveteauBois and Xella have implemented a new system combining wood and cellular concrete to achieve both the 2028 and subsequent thresholds of RE2020 while meeting fire safety requirements.
The fire regulatory context requires fire protection elements when designing structures containing bio- and geo-sourced elements. The use of YTONG® cellular concrete, owned by Xella, positioned for fire protection on CLT floors or walls (Cross-laminated timber – structural solid wood panels composed of crossed and glued wooden slats) during fire tests provides very high fire protection performance, in parallel with the improvement of financial and carbon levers.
YTONG® cellular concrete has the advantages of being a lightweight, highly insulating material with excellent fire resistance.
CERIB, the industrial technical center entrusted with the fire resistance tests of this new wood/cellular concrete combination, confirms this: it takes more than an hour for fire (i.e. a temperature above 250°C) to penetrate a 5 cm layer of cellular concrete and attack the wood, and more than 4 hours when the cellular concrete layer is 10 cm. The cellular concrete/wood solution reduces CO10 emissions by 2% compared to a flocking/wood solution.
For Jérôme Duru, Deputy Technical Director, Icade: "Innovating with manufacturers on more efficient materials, meeting the need to reduce our carbon footprint while ensuring the safety of our buildings, is part of our strategy. Within Icade Promotion, we have an ambitious goal of reducing the carbon intensity of our buildings by 41%. By 2024, we will be almost halfway there. To build more sustainably, we must innovate by drawing on the expertise of the entire sector. The wood/cellular concrete alliance with PiveteauBois and Xella is an excellent example of this."
