New Findings on Fire Safety Polymeric Materials

Abstract

Usually, we believe the introduction of flame retardants, such as P-containing or N-containing additives, to polymeric materials lead to the improvement of flame retardancy, since such conclusions had been approved by thousands of publications in flame retardant communities. Besides, a series of fire behaviors and flame-retardant mechanisms of these flame-retardant polymers were investigated. However, recent findings in flame retardant materials at the research group at Madrid may make people re-think such conclusions. Madrid team found, in some exceptional cases, flame retardants to polymeric materials does not follow the traditional “conclusions” which we usually believe; on the contrary, the addition of flame retardants to polymers may make the flame even stronger and/or worsen the flame retardancy. It would be very interesting to study how flame retardants work in such polymer systems. In this lecture, it will mainly focus on the fire behaviors and flame-retardant mechanisms in three systems, silicon rubber, polypropylene and liquid electrolyte, which are the latest research findings in the research group at IMDEA Materials Institute in Madrid.