In close collaboration with Regina, a fire retardant surfacing material called FireShield® was developed for passive fire protection in industries such as aerospace, maritime, renewable energy, mining, oil & gas and civil infrastructure buildings to meet stringent fire rating standards for advanced composite structures. The challenging requirements determined the development of a simple and elegant single ply intumescent composite tissue veil, helping solve a need to protect products from high temperature fires without impacting the performance of high strength, light-weight composite structures.
In the event of fire, the protective intumescent FireShield® ply will char on the surface to insulate the structure from high temperatures and prevent oxygen flow. This provides two critical properties in resisting fire conditions and defining performance features of FireShield®: i) structural integrity, strength and stiffness of the composite product is maintained; and ii) the intumescent layer is self-extinguishing, limiting fire progression. FireShield® is compliant with industry fire protection standards and can be easily integrated into existing products and without change to process. Are your structures fire ready?
To learn more about FireShield® please visit the Regina website or contact us today to get started on protecting your composite products from fire. ACS Australia is a trusted partner in product development and can support with the design of passive fire protection in composite structures.
Below is a short video, which includes a section from a Regina test video where two similar fibre composite structure samples made from glass fibre reinforced polyester resin, pultruded sections with 500 mm wide sides, and heated to 750°C. One sample is unprotected while the other has a very thin protective FireShield® ply on the flame facing side. The samples experience heat for three minutes at which point the unprotected sample fails and the test is terminated, while the FireShield® sample continues without failure beyond 30 minutes duration. The charred insulating surface (thermal conductivity ~0.04 – 0.07 J/mK) is measured by thermocouples to have a ∆T of 450°C, showing no change over the 30 minutes of the burn. This indicates that the char itself was not reduced or ablated by the propane burner. The FireShield® protected sample experienced no ablation or spalling of the material.
Regina Fire Protection composite technology is an ongoing collaboration between Advanced Composite Structures Australia and Regina.