Evaluation on Combustion Characteristics of Finishing Materials for Exterior Walls

Existing fire test methods reply on measurement of the energy released rate to identify the combustion properties of a material. However, they are inadequate when assessing combustion characteristics of a composite material characterized by vertical flame spread and different inside/outside combustion behaviors. In addition, major factors that affect the flame spread outside the building include the combustion characteristics of materials used as well as air flow around a skyscraper. However, since it is highly difficult to analyze and forecast the air flow from a fire engineering viewpoint, an investigation of the flame spread characteristics of exterior walls of a building depends primarily on the combustion characteristics of materials. Hence, this study examined, using ISO 13785-2 testing method, the temperature changes and vertical flame spread behaviors of one of the finishing materials for exterior walls--（generic ＆ fire-resistant） aluminium panels by a real-scale combustion experiment. According to the results of real-scale experiment, the maximum heat temperature of 987.7 ℃ was recorded seven minutes after the fire test was initiated while the fire-resistant aluminium panels showed the maximum heat temperature of 850.2℃ after exposed for approximately 12 min. The vertical flame spread properties put more emphasis on the time required to reach the maximum temperature rather than its magnitude and there was a five minutes difference between the materials.

The flame retardancy of alginate/flame retardant viscose fibers investigated by vertical burning test and cone calorimeter

In this research, the flame retardancy of neat alginate fiber, flame retardant viscose fiber （FRV） and alginate/FRV （50/50） blending fibers were investigated by vertical burning and cone calorimeter tests. The vertical burning test showed that the afterflame time of alginate fiber was 0 s, but alginate presented serious smoldering behavior with the afterglow time of 605 s and damaged length of 85 mm, while the afterglow time of FRV was 0 s. When the FRV was incorporated into alginate with the weight ratio of 50/ 50, the afterglow time and damaged length were significantly reduced to 85 s and 35 mm, indicating the smoldering of alginate can be effectively decreased. The morphology and chemical structure of the alginate residual demonstrated that it was seriously destroyed during smoldering process, which was ascribed to its relative low initial thermal degradation temperature. Based on the thermal properties analysis, alginate and FRV fibers shared the concurrence of rapid degradation in the same temperature region of 250-300 ℃, through which, the compact and stable char formed by FRV can prevent the heat transmission and suppress the smoldering of alginate. Further, the cone calorimeter results demonstrated that the time to ignition （TTI） significantly increased and peak heat release rate （PHRR） decreased for alginate/FRV （50/50） compared with FRV. With this research, a new method to overcome the smoldering of alginate was proposed by blending with FRV