The combustibility of wood is one of its major challenges for use as a building material. The response of materials to an initial fire attack, defined via parameters such as time to ignition, flame spread rate, and heat release rate, are the important properties relevant to fire propagation, to which wooden products are normally vulnerable (Östman & Tsantaridis, 2016, 2017). There are indications that the current revision of the European fire safety regulations will tighten the requirements, limiting the use of large, visible, unprotected wood surfaces, thus, improving the fire properties of wood is critical to maximising its use and benefits. Fire retardants can help wood achieve this through various mechanisms (Lowden & Hull, 2013). Wood treatments with commercial halogenated compounds based on chlorine or bromine are effective flame retardants (Guo et al. 2020), however, their hydrophilic character and negative impacts on human health, as well as environmental concerns, impact their application. A wide range of other effective fire-retardants, like those based on boron, aluminium, magnesium, or phosphorus compounds, have been studied, however, boron is also being phased out and many of the salt based fire retardants are easily leached from wood when exposed to high moisture levels, and thus, their fire-protecting effect can decrease over time. The current study was conducted to investigate if the fire-related properties of wood can be improved using biobased molecules and what the impacts of leaching may have on them.
Keywords: fire retardants, biobased, fire performance
Authors
Konrad Wilkens Flecknoe-Brown
Division of Fire Safety Engineering, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Reza Hosseinpourpia
Department of Forestry and Wood Technology, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
Sheikh Ali Ahmed
Department of Forestry and Wood Technology, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
Emil Engelund Thybring
Bioresource Chemistry and Technology, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Nils Johansson
Division of Fire Safety Engineering, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Maria Fredriksson
Division of Buildings Materials, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Login to download the PDF