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The European Meeting on Fire Retardancy and Protection of Materials (FRPM -15) was held in Berlin (Germany) at the BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing from 21-25th June 2015.The conference attracted leading professionals from universities, research institutions and industries who are actively working in this area.
The event offered a common platform to interact with practicing fire safety engineers, researchers and scientists to discuss latest developments occurring in the area of fire modelling, testing and product development with regard to improving fire safety of polymeric materials used in distinct engineering applications such as building constructions, transportation electrical and electronic equipment.
Abhishek Bhargava presented a poster titled ‘Using Distributed Activation Energy Model to Predict Mass Loss Rates in PMMA’ and discussed different aspects of modelling and simulation strategies that could be applied to the overall objectives of FireTools project.
The main highlights of the conference included:
-Dedicated workshop on state of the art developments occurring in the field of reaction to fire with focus on micro scale and bench scale testing of materials.
– Notable speakers included Sean Gregory (Fire Testing Technology, UK) and Richard Walters (Federal Aviation Administration, USA) who spoke about advances in cone calorimetry and micro-combustion calorimeter respectively. Stephen Grayson (Interscience Communications, UK) highlighted the applications of these evelopments in the area of research and regulations.
– Largely the discussions were focused on development of halogen free flame retardants such as phosphorous and bio-based ones. Several presentations were related to the applicability of these developments in making new and innovative fire retardants applicable to different polymeric materials such as epoxy resins, poly-styrene (EPS), textiles and poly-olefins.
– Sessions on fire testing, modelling and toxicity aspects of flame retardants were also in focus.
– Some presentations related to Fire modelling and simulation of polymeric materials using open source CFD codes such as Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) were also presented.
-The delegates were given a guided tour to BAM large scale fire testing facility used for performing explosion experiments .