Fire resistance of carbon-based composite materials under both ideal and realistic normative configurations

摘要

In industrial and transportation system, composite materials are now commonly used. However, despite their superior mechanical properties and weight reduction capacity, such materials are highly vulnerable to fire. To access such risks in the aeronautical industry, standard tests are performed at different scales on representative selected samples. In this work, the fire behavior of three different carbon-reinforced composites (carbon-phenolic, carbon-PEKK and carbon-BMI) is evaluated at medium and large-scale using state of the art techniques, such as Cone calorimeter and NexGen burner. To provide a detailed description of the fire behavior of these three materials, mass loss as well as the backward face temperature are provided and compared for the different scales. The results highlight better thermal stability of the carbon-PEKK and the carbon-BMI in comparison with the carbon-phenolic; moreover the evolution of the phenomena between different scales is observed.