Fire Characteristics of Polyester FRP Composites with Different Glass Contents

摘要

For the composites industry to "design for fire" more thorough understanding of how typical FRPs decompose under fire conditions is needed. Under fire conditions the role played by the glass and the resin (and additives) for FRPs are keys to understanding the fire behavior. To that end, this study continues work presented at Composites 2006. A polyester resin system and three glass contents will be considered. This set of polyester FRPs has been carefully fabricated and documented so as to provide "transparency" as to the system compositions. The polyester FRP of this study have been evaluated in modern bench scale fire test apparatuses (Cone and FPA) with additional instrumentation to allow surface and internal temperatures to be measured as well as surface heat fluxes. Additionally, thermal analysis of the polyester polymer resin is conducted using Thermalgravimetric Analysis (TGA) and Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC). This study provides complete data sets for pyrolysis modeling for the polyester FRP composite. Development of simplified pyrolysis models will allow the composites industry to "design for fire" via virtual simulations of fire behavior. For typical fire thermal insults, it is found that the internal temperatures for typical fire heat flux levels are more than adequate to decompose the polyester resin. The temperature distributions are also insensitive to the glass content indicating that for flammability the base characteristics of the polyester FRP are controlled by the surface glass layers.