Effect of the fire retardant concentration on the thermal degradation of rigid polyurthane foams prepared with different blowing agents

摘要

Rigid polyurethane foams are used for numerous applications in the building and automotive industries, due to their superior mechanical properties and low density. Unfortunately, polyurethane foam also have an inherent high flammability and smoke evolution during thermal degradation. In order to comply with fire safety standards, these shortcoming can be suppressed by either adding fire retardants (FR) or by chemically modifying the polymeric backbone (e.g. introduction of polyisocyanurate groups), or by a combination of both. The objective of this work is to investigate the effect of FR concentration on the thermal degradation of rigid polyurethane foams produced using 141b and pentane as blowing agents.