Wood is an excellent building material and can bind carbon for a long time when used in buildings thereby stopping carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.
The use of wood in high-rise building facades, could imply a risk concerning fire. The potential consequence of such a fire is debated and efficient fire protection of the wooden facades during service life is required. The challenge is the clear tendency for fire retardants to be washed away by rain and degraded by sun light. However, there are fire-retardant products which are approved according to the tests described below and thus last a long time on wooden facades providing efficient fire protection.
The European standard to verify whether a coating or impregnation for fire protection of wood are durable against degradation by sun light and leaching by rain is the EN16755 [1]. The fire protected wood is exposed for UV light and rain according to the standard and fire tested before and after the ageing procedure according to EN13823 [2].
RISE is performing research on using side streams from various biobased industries to enhance the use of biomaterials as well as for improving the circularity of materials. Some conventional fire retardants in intumescent coatings have been shown to have low resistant for leaching in exterior conditions [3, 4]. In an on-going study, vanillin was chemically combined with fire retardants (FR) to try to enhance the resistance against water leaching. The testing in exterior conditions is being perform at present and the methodology will be further discussed below. The present work is carried out within the EU project HyPELignum.
Keywords: High-rise buildings, wood façade, fire retardant, vanillin
Authors
Anders Larsson
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
Jiebing Li
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
Mikaela Kubat
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
Johanna Elam
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
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