Sealant application in curtain wall engineering

The development of modern curtain wall has driven the development of related materials. The materials used for building curtain wall can be divided into four parts: plate, support structure, sealing seam filling material and structural bonding material. One plate usually use the material such as metal, glass, ceramics and stone, and the internal supporting structure using glass rib, steel structure and aluminum beam column structure form, which also includes the connection plate and profiles between the structure of silicone sealant, hollow glass sealing with sealant, silicone waterproof sealing effect of weathering sealant, and the pad rubber strip materials. In practical engineering applications, we pay more attention to bulk materials such as aluminum and glass, and often ignore small materials such as sealant. The cost of sealant in curtain wall engineering does not account for more than 3%, but it plays a vital role in the whole curtain wall system. Once failure occurs, the maintenance and repair costs are very high in the later period. This paper mainly analyzes the problems of sealant in the application of curtain wall construction, and puts forward the corresponding solutions and suggestions.

Generally speaking, the design service life of the curtain wall panel is more than 50 years, which requires the use of materials must also have a long service life. So far, silicone sealant has been applied on the building curtain wall for more than 40 years. In recent years, the ultra-high building curtain wall and the large, complex and diversified plate, so that we pay more and more attention to the safety of the building curtain wall, the attention of both curtain wall safety regulations have also been introduced, at the same time, the structure and joint sealant performance also put forward higher requirements. High performance structural sealant with high strength, high elongation, excellent adhesion, durability and other characteristics emerged and has been widely used. However, the extreme climate environment is still a severe challenge to the service life of the building curtain wall. Silicone structural sealant itself has a high bonding strength, which can play the role of structural bonding, and good elasticity can transfer the inter-layer displacement between the glass and the curtain wall facade. Silicone weather resistant sealant is often used as a waterproof sealing material between curtain wall panels. It can also play an elastic buffer protective role when the curtain wall panels change in displacement. When the earthquake comes, silicone structural sealant and weathering sealant can play a very good role in protecting the building curtain wall.