Cosmos
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By Cosmos
A new fire-retardant paint, formulated over five years by engineers at the University of New Wales, has become the first to pass a stringent Australian standard test that simulates a bushfire attack.
The paint achieved the Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) 40 standard which assesses the bushfire resistance of buildings and construction materials.
Quotes attributable to Professor Guan Yeoh, Director of the ARC Training Centre for Fire Retardant Materials and Safety Technologies at UNSW.
Professor Guan Yeoh, Director of the ARC Training Centre for Fire Retardant Materials and Safety Technologies at UNSW describes the paint as a “breakthrough: “It’s a paint that has satisfied the second highest fire rating, which means that it can protect houses.”
“If you apply the paint, which is an undercoat, onto the house, it will transform itself to a very thick, carbon or char layer that actually protects the substrate and deflecting the heat away from the bushfires.”
“It’s basically just like the normal undercoat that you will use for a lot of paints at the moment. But it’s just that it has some so-called secret ingredients that actually grows the layer.”
“I can’t reveal my secret ingredients to you. You know, I have to do like Colonel Sanders, protecting the KFC recipe.”
“When you talk about fire, it reaches about 1000 °C to 1200 °C, that is how hot the fire is. And basically when it reaches the surface it’s around that temperature.
“And what you tried to do then is to have a protective layer that can decrease the temperature from 1000 degress C to roughly around 25 to 30 degrees C at the substrate surface.”
Under heat the paint grows from a very thin layer to a very thick layer to protect the timber. After a wildfire some residue remains. “But you can see that the wood itself is actually not burnt at all,” says Yeoh. “Prep your surface again and then you repaint it. It is as straightforward as that.
“We need something to increase the resilience and hope that this will be the start of the development of what people think of using common things like paint, or even other devices, whatever, to actually increase the fire resilience.”
Professor Guan Heng Yeoh is Director of the ARC Training Centre for Fire Retardant Materials and Safety Technologies.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.