Flame Retardancy And Smoke Production Of Water-Based Acrylate Hybrid Emulsion Intumescent Fire Retarded Coating

Intumescent fire retardant coatings as the most widely applied and the most convenient and effective fire retardant coatings has played a very important role in protection from fire. But fire-retardant coatings released much fume and toxic gases in the process of expansion, whose threat hampered people’s safe evacuation,fire-fighting and rescue,resulting in a huge number of people injured or died and property loss. The study on smoke was just as important as flame retardant. So the study trends to be on the high-quality, flame retardant and smoke suppression in the future.In this paper the widely-applied water-based intumescent fire-retarded coating was selected as the basic system for study. First, test results showed that the heat release rate and the smoke production rate increased with the content of AHE. The specific optical density of the coating composed of 30% AHE was smallest. The small chamber test results indicated that the coating composed of 30% AHE provided optimal protection from the flame. Second, the uniform design experimentation was applied to optimize the formulation of APP, PER and MEL. The optimization aim incorporated results of the small chamber test, the cone calorimetry, and the smoke density test. With the help of tools such as Lingo, the optimal formulation for APP:PER:MEL was obtained to be 2:1:1 through linear programming. Third, the thermogravimetry was used to investigate the decomposition process of the intumescent flame retardant system, finding that the decomposition temperature ranges of ammonium polyphosphate(APP),pentaerythritol and melamine were nearly equal. The decomposition characteristics of AHE, IFR and AHE/30%IFR were also studied by the thermogravimetric thchnique. The residue after decomposition was studied by the elemental analyzer. Finally, the cone calorimetry was applied to investigate the smoke suppression effect of five additives including molybdenum oxide, ammonium molybdate, expanded graphite, zinc borate and antimony trioxide. It was found that when the incorporation of Molybdenum compounds and EG (EG) had good flame retardant and smoke suppression effect. Zinc borate and antimony trioxide mainly played the role on delaying fire burning and smoke production. The expandable graphite provided good flame retardancy and smoke suppression, which was further analyzed by the electron microscope observation.