Reducing fire hazards from materials

style=”line-height:normal”>For each of these areas, the experts considered the direction of current R&D and how it may impact future fire hazard reduction goals such as developing new materials, establishing product flammability standards and advancing computational tools. They also addressed emerging technologies and practices such as the increasing use of high-energy density (lithium-ion) batteries that have been in the news for flammability concerns.

The workshop participants agreed that the highest priority for future scientific studies and development projects in flammability should go to cross-cutting research approaches that can work against multiple hazards across a wide range of materials and applications. These are:

· Real fire behaviors: To understand how the actual use of a product impacts its fire service-life (the fire resistance over the life of a product) and burning behavior;

· Engineered fire-safe products: To enable the development of technologies that yield products compliant with flammability regulations for their entire lifetime; and

· Bench-scale and computational tools: To develop and use physical testing methods and computer modeling systems that accurately predict a material’s real-life fire behavior.

The new roadmap strongly recommends that these research approaches be applied to the five most critical and urgent fire hazards as defined by the experts at the recent workshop. These are: residential upholstered furniture, residential buildings in Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) communities (the U.S. Forest Service defines the wildland urban interface, or WUI, as an “area where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels”), timber used for multistory buildings, passenger railway cars and insulation applied to the exteriors of high-rise buildings.

“The workshop participants determined that these application areas should be prioritized for R&D because reducing flammability in all five should significantly reduce the overall losses from fires in the future,” Davis said.

The benefits from the new research roadmap, Davis said, could eventually be greater than just getting low-fire-hazard products to market. “It’s our hope that the research resulting from the roadmap will lead to science-based quality control measures, testing procedures and performance standards for materials flammability, which in turn, should reduce the costs of making products, simplify regulatory compliance for manufacturers, and provide consumers with more fire-safe product choices,” he explained.

Davis added that along with being actively engaged with its partners to promote and urge acceptance and use of the new roadmap by others, NIST has already begun putting it to work.

“Based on extensive discussions with our in-house experts after considering the roadmap’s guidelines, we are planning changes in our upcoming year’s research and modifying our long-term strategies,” he said.

— Read more in R. Davis, M. Zammarano, N. Marsh, P. Donnelly, S. McQueen and A. Raghunathan. Workshop Report: Research Roadmap for Reducing the Fire Hazards of Materials in the Future. NIST Special Publication 1220 (2018). DOI: doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.1220