Jan 29 2007
Industrial applications such as interior fittings in vehicles, planes and ships require a high level of flame resistance with the aim of enhancing the probabilities of survival of passengers in case of accident.
According to data from 2001, in Spain two out of every thousand cars involved in accidents catch fire, with an average of two deaths and ten people seriously injured. In Europe, of the 250,000 fires in cars that happen annually, the tally is 500 deaths and 3,000 injured. Plastics and textiles are the materials that catch fire first, in about 35% of the total vehicle fires, while fuel catching alight is the second cause of fire.
These materials are traditionally manufactured in PVC; the toxic gases and corrosive smoke produced by them on catching fire explain the current tendency throughout Europe of substituting the PVC employed in the manufacture of interior fittings in vehicles by new materials that are fire-resistant and which are, moreover, less toxic on burning.
At present, the compounds based on fire-retarding polypropylenes (PP) are deemed a good alternative given their exceptional properties in combustion. The consumption of this type of plastic, in fact, has seen the greatest increase over the past few years. The fire retardant most promising as a filler for PP is magnesium hydroxide, which is stable at the temperatures for processing PP and with less dangerous combustion than the compounds. Its drawback is that it has to be used in great quantities, thus causing the loss of mechanical properties and of processabilty of compounds loaded with this retarding agent.
This is the context of the European FLARETPOL (“Development of an Innovative, Cost-Effective Technology to Produce Halogen-free, High-Performance, Flame-Retarded Polypropylene”) project. The aim of the project is to resolve the problem of producing flame-resistant plastics based on PP filled with particles of magnesium hydroxide. Financed by the European Union within the VI Framework Programme, there are fourteen members in the project - GAIKER-IK4 amongst them - which will work to enhance the properties of the processabilty of these plastics so that they can attain the strictest standards demanded for mechanical properties and flame resistance.
This innovation will enable a great advance in the field of fire-retarding plastics materials, and this, in turn, will enable it, to a large extent, to be extrapolated to areas of manufacture of sophisticated compounds, having improved the properties of the polymeric systems with inorganic fillers and taking into account the potential and versatility of the interface modifiers to be designed, synthesized and used. Likewise, it will enable a greater number of future applications and will require research in the long term to exploit all its potential. GAIKER-IK4, from its Area of Plastics and Composites, is participating in the project in the processing part and the characterisation of new fireproof formulations as regards behaviour in fire conditions.