For the last few months, Synseal’s new WarmCore aluminium folding sliding door system has been undergoing extended extreme weather testing in Portugal, along with structural strength and enhanced security testing which has been carried out by UKAS testing laboratories, with both tests regimes yielding ‘excellent results’.
A five-sash WarmCore unit was installed in an outdoor location in Lisbon, Portugal back in July ‘14 and this continental climate exposure testing programme will continue indefinitely to prove the technical performance of the aluminium framing in association with the third generation thermal break, which is the ‘warm aluminium’ core at the heart of the product.
Late summer test results in September ‘14 recorded an ambient temperature of 40oC immediately adjacent to the test rig and an external aluminium frame temperature of 71oC, the severity of which surprised the Synseal test engineers.
The WarmCore folding sliding door continued to function ‘perfectly’ with dimensional stability of sash and frames unaffected by these extreme temperatures, which will certainly far exceed any warm weather climate conditions experienced in the UK.
Meanwhile in UKAS laboratory testing, a four-three-one configuration WarmCore folding sliding door was subjected to a full PAS24:2012 testing programme. The mechanical load test calls for the unit to withstand a loading of 4.5kN for 10 seconds, which was easily achieved. The WarmCore door then went on to withstand more than 9.1kN, representing a loading approaching 1 tonne on a single point of application.
Phil Parry, Synseal’s head of research and development, commented: “We selected Portugal because we knew the local weather cycles with hot days and often chilly nights would create some extreme fluctuations and really test our new frame technology over an extended period of time. To date the results have been very impressive and the point load testing has confirmed that we have achieved what we set out to do in our initial brief, which was to design a next generation, thermally efficient, inherently strong and durable aluminium frame construction.”
