Characterising fundamental fire protection performance of intumescent coating under realistic fire conditions

在英国，超过70%的商业建筑是钢结构，膨胀型涂料现在占钢结构防火市场的50%以上。然而，在实际火灾条件下的膨胀型涂料的防火性能是未知的，因为它们的防火性能的评估是基于所谓的标准耐火性测试，其中火灾暴露与实际火灾条件无关。膨胀型涂料是一种反应性材料，其性能高度依赖于火灾暴露类型，因此使用标准耐火测试来评估其性能是无效的。这个问题已经变得尖锐，因为消防安全设计现在正在从标准火灾条件下的规定性设计转向基于性能的设计，允许现实的火灾条件。此外，在以性能为本的设计下，大部分多余的钢结构防火措施现已被删除，以降低建筑成本。因此，重要的是，关键的防火材料在实际火灾条件下按预期发挥作用。性能化防火设计是一种技术进步。为了帮助建筑行业安全地利用这一新技术的进步，拟议的研究将开发一个合理的方法来表征在现实火灾条件下的膨胀型涂料的防火性能。拟议的研究将涉及大量的膨胀型涂料产品暴露在一系列加热条件下的锥形量热计和炉内进行广泛的测试，并将进行与英国的两个最大的膨胀型涂料制造商谁将提供相关的工业咨询，免费的测试样品和TGA测试结果的实质性贡献。将进行分析，以建立一个程序，提取以下关键防火性能的膨胀型涂料：化学反应动力学常数（从TGA数据），最大膨胀率（从了解的持续时间可用于膨胀），空隙体积和等效空隙尺寸（从质量损失，膨胀率和传热分析）。这项研究旨在验证这一假设，即从一小组火灾试验中提取的上述关键特性可以应用于其他火灾条件。一些初步的工作已经完成了一个博士项目的建议者监督，以证明拟议的方法的可行性。拟议的研究将调查该方法的广泛适用性，通过调查不同的膨胀型涂料产品在不同的火灾条件下，并将开发一个强大的协议，以可靠地提取在现实火灾条件下的膨胀型涂料的关键防火性能特性。

Over 70% of commercial buildings in the UK are steel framed and intumescent coating now accounts for more than 50% of the steel structure fire protection market. However, the fire protection properties of intumescent coating under realistic fire conditions are not known because assessment of their fire protection performance is based on the so-called standard fire resistance tests in which the fire exposure bears no relation to realistic fire conditions. Intumescent coating is a reactive material and its properties are highly dependent on the fire exposure type so using the standard fire resistance test to assess its performance is not valid. This problem has become acute because fire safety design is now moving away from prescriptive design under the standard fire condition to performance based design which allows for realistic fire conditions. In addition, under performance based design, much of the redundancy in fire protection to steel structures is now being removed to reduce construction cost. It is therefore important that the critical fire protection materials perform as intended under realistic fire conditions. Performance based fire safety design is a technology advance. In order to help the construction industry to safetly exploit advances in this new technology, the proposed research will develop a rational method of characterising the fire protection performance of intumescent coating under realistic fire conditions. The proposed research will involve extensive testing of a number of intumescent coating products exposed to a range of heating conditions under a cone calorimeter and in furnace and will be carried out with substantial contributions from the UK's two largest intumescent coating manufacturers who will provide relevant industrial advice, free test samples and TGA test results. Analysis will be performed to establish a procedure to extract the following key fire protection properties of intumescent coating: chemical reaction kinetics constants (from TGA data), maximum rate of expansion (from an understanding of the duration of time available for intumescing), void volume and equivalent void size (from mass loss, rate of expansion and heat transfer analysis). This proposed research aims to validate the hypothesis that the above key properties extracted from a small set of fire tests can be applied to other fire conditions. Some preliminary work has already been done in a PhD project supervised by the proposers to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology. The proposed research will investigate wide applicability of the method, by investigating different intumescent coating products under different fire conditions and will develop a robust protocol to reliably extract the key fire protection performance properties of intumescent coating under realistic fire conditions.