Consequent to abig building fire started with burning furniture foam, safety requirements of furniture materials are established. Foam should be treated with fire retardant additives, and their ignitability should also be tested under a small flame. However, it has not been proved that those requirements are workable by in-depth investigations. The fire behavior of materials should be assessed under flashover fires. In this presentation, samples of furniture foam, including those with and without fire retardants, were tested in a cone calorimeter under heat fluxes up to 70 kWm-2. Both the thermal and smoke aspects were studied. It was observed that foam treated with fire retardant was not ignited under an incident heat flux of 10 kWm-2. However, when burning under heat fluxes of higher than 20 kWm-2, they did not show much improvement in the thermal aspect compared with untreated foam. Even more smoke and toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide, were emitted. Therefore, it appears that foam treated with fire retardant would only show greater resistance under small fires. In order to have a better understanding of commercial products, chemical constituents were analyzed.
展开▼
