Chemists are working with fire safety researchers to investigate high throughput techniques for speeding up the testing of fire retardant materials. 

Charles Wilkie of Marquette University, USA, and colleagues have demonstrated how well the integrated new methods can reproduce the conclusions of more complex conventional ones.

Modern fire retardant materials are complex, made from many different components, including processing additives, fillers and stabilizers as well as the fire retardant itself.  As a result, testing such materials is a lengthy process, because varying the proportions of its components may adversely affect its fire stopping properties. 

Testing all the possible compositions is currently a slow process because current testing methods rely on combining the results of dozens of single experiments.

The team, including researchers from the Fire Safety Branch of the US Federal Aviation Administration, have assessed the high throughput approaches and how well they perform compared with current methods. In particular, Wilkie said that automated pyrolysis-combustion flow calorimetry is one of the 'promising candidates' for future development. It is being considered as a possible future standard for the testing of fire retardant materials.

David J Parker