USE OF MILLIGRAM-SCALE FLAME CALORIMETRY FOR CHARACTERIZING FLAMMABILITY OF FABRIC SAMPLES WITH FLAME RETARDANT TREATMENTS

Abstract

The fire hazard associated with fabrics threatens everyone’s safety, and the current standards used to reduce those hazards are expensive and time-consuming. Fabrics are a key component in clothing, upholstery, and carpentry and are present in nearly every built environment. The inherent flammability of fabrics leads to the application of flame-retardant treatments on nearly all commercial fabric products. Recently, environmental, economic and performance concerns have driven research to develop new flame retardants across a variety of materials. The military industry in particular has focused recent research efforts on flame retardant treatments for fabrics, given the challenging environments that military uniforms must endure. Current methods for testing performance of novel flame retardants, such as the Cone Calorimeter and Microscale Combustion Calorimeter can be prohibitively expensive or only provide a limited understanding of flame-retardant action. Fabrics present additional testing challenges due to their low density and thickness, effectively reducing the amount of fuel available for testing. A novel apparatus, the Milligram-scale Flame Calorimeter (MFC), has been used to test flame retardants in polymeric materials, successfully capturing gas-phase activity and with favorable comparison to Cone Calorimeter results. This study aims to expand the use of the MFC to the testing of fabrics and flame-retardant treated fabrics. Optimization tests were run to find the optimal number of fabric layers and best method for preparing samples for use in MFC. Subsequently, cotton fabrics (untreated and treated with phosphoric acid), as well as Nylon fabrics (untreated and treated with tannic acid) were characterized with MFC, and results were compared to those from the Microscale Combustion Calorimeter and Cone Calorimeter. The MFC showed similar trends in the onset of ignition, peak heat release rate, average heat release rate, char yield, and heat of combustion for the untreated fabrics with the Cone Calorimeter and Microscale Combustion Calorimeter results. The results for the flame-retarded fabrics are inconclusive and require additional testing, though the observations of the condensed-phase and gas-phase activity for the MFC samples does provide important insights on how the mechanism for the flame retardants operate.