Product category:
Fire and Smoke Protection, Detection and Alarms
News Release from: International Fire Consultants | Subject: Intumescent coatings
Edited by the Buildingtalk Editorial
Team on 14 August 2006
Intumescent coatings and fire resistance
of steel
IFC has developed a 3D Interpolation method of assessment for the characterisation of intumescent coatings for the protection of structural steelwork against fire.
Contribution of intumescent coatings to the fire resistance of structural steel In recent years there have been many discussions on how best to characterise the contribution of intumescent coatings to the fire resistance of structural steelwork and it has taken many years to develop these different assessment methods
This article was originally published on Buildingtalk on 16 Apr 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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It is generally accepted that existing assessment methods provide a way of predicting the performance times, but with unacceptable margins of error.
Due to the erroneous nature of current assessments criteria for acceptability of results have been put into place in many standards and guidelines.
IFC therefore recognised a need to develop an exact prediction of the performance times based on facts rather than estimations.
Further reading
Implementation of Integrated Fire Risk Management
Dave Berry, one of IFC's Principal Consultants presented his paper on the "Implementation of Integrated Fire Risk Management - what educational base do we require?" at the Rasbash Lecture.
Implementation of Integrated Fire Risk Management
Dave Berry, one of IFC's Principal Consultants presented paper on 'Implementation of Integrated Fire Risk Management - what educational base do we require?' at the recent Rasbash Lecture.
IFC are therefore proud to announce that Mr Hans van de Weijgert a Principal Engineer at IFC has developed a "3D Interpolation method of assessment for the characterisation of intumescent coatings for the protection of structural steelwork against fire".
The reason that it has taken many years to study the behaviour of intumescent coatings without achieving a satisfactory characterisation method is due to the complexity of the subject, which is actually a 4-dimensional problem.
How is it done?.
IFC's assessment method takes factual data from fire tests, measures performance times and projects them into a 3-dimensional space, whilst taking into account a fourth dimension, which in this case is temperature.
The four dimensions are section factor (Hp/A), dry film thickness (DFT), performance time (t) and design steel temperature (T).
Below shows the output of Mr van de Weijgert's mathematical assessment:.
What are the advantages?.
IFC's 3D Interpolation Method:.
* is based only on facts.
* provides the basis for assessments with negligible error.
* complies with criteria of acceptability by default.
* identifies the lower and upper limit of the DFT's for a particular value of Hp/A.
* provides predictive knowledge of the performance.
Conclusion.
The 3D Interpolation Method is the only available assessment method so far that is based on facts only and will therefore render all discussions of pushing, pulling or manipulating the contribution of intumescent coatings to the fire resistance performance of structural steel work, redundant.
This method has a huge potential for saving intumescent coating manufactures large costs in research and developing by alleviating the need to carry out a large number of expensive tests.
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