Development of fire retardants (FRs) for wood spans over several decades. Commercial FRs for wood are available, however, most of them have problems with performance, emissions, or other issues. Halogenated FRs cause the health and environmental problem (Debenest et al. 2010). Organic FRs such as melamine are less effective. Inorganic FRs require high doses and they are leached out in moist conditions. To overcome these limitations, recently reported studies have included mineralized wood using bioinspired struvite (Guoet al. 2019) and calcium carbonate (Merk et al. 2015; Merk et al. 2016) in situ polymerization in wood usinganiline, furfural (Kong et al. 2018), and nanostructured wood-hybrids prepared by impregnating montmorillonite (Fu et al. 2017). In addition to these, researchers have developed FRs as coatings, including graphene-borate (Nine et al. 2017), casein-magnesium (Uddin et al. 2020), vermiculite-sodium silicate composites (Kumar et al. 2015), and inorganic aluminophosphate adhesive and intumescent coatings based on thiol-ene click chemistry (Ma et al. 2019). However, all of these studied materials are still far from practical purposes due to cost issues and sophisticated processes needed for industrial manufacture of these materials. Therefore, the focus of the current study was to develop cheap, green and durable fire-retardant composite coatings using casein, mica and aluminium trihydroxide (ATH) for wood and engineered wood products. Coated wood was examined with a cone calorimeter to assess the fire retardancy.
Keywords: Struvite, fire retardant, coating, engineered wood, Pinus sylvestris
Authors
M. Uddin
R. Lappalainen
A. Haapala
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