Situated on the northern corner of Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium development, Ashburton Triangle houses 250 dwellings and the football club’s museum. Originally completed in 2007, the building is currently undergoing refurbishment. The works include a refreshed façade which features a number of spandrel and accent panels around windows and inset balconies. To effectively insulate these areas whilst also meeting the reaction to fire performance requirements for the façade insulation, AlphaCore Pad was installed.

Specialist façade and roofing contractors, RKC, carried out the installation of the new cladding system. The project’s location in North London next to a major stadium and two train lines has meant works needed to be carefully planned and scheduled.

To reflect the design of the Emirates stadium, the revised façade system is primarily finished in metallic grey panels, with certain details around windows and balconies picked out in the club’s red. These red areas posed a challenge as there was less available depth for insulation compared with the rest of the façade. Fitting a traditional A1 or A2-s1,d0 rated insulation would have meant compromising on the thermal performance in these areas due to this lack of space. AlphaCore Pad provided the solution.

The boards achieve a thermal conductivity of just 0.020 W/mK, considerably lower than many commonly used A1 or A2-s1,d0 class façade insulation solutions. This makes it well suited to challenging applications, such as Ashburton Triangle, where the available space for the insulation is limited.

The RKC installers carefully measured the boards and cut them to size with box cutters to accurately infill the spaces. Pro Clima’s ‘Compego’ tape was then applied to the cut joints before they were mechanically fixed in place, ready for the finished cladding to be installed.

AlphaCore Pad is suitable for use in rainscreen facades and soffit applications for new and existing buildings. The boards are produced at Kingspan Insulation’s Pembridge, Herefordshire manufacturing facility and are manufactured under a management system certified to ISO 14001: 2015 (Environmental management systems).