An Examination of the Physico-Chemical Fire Retardant Mechanism of Burn-X in Wood

Pine was treated with a fire retardant agent called Burn-X, which is mainly an aqueous solution of calcium cations, to impart flame retardancy. Fire retardant treated and untreated samples were subjected to differential thermal analysis (DTA) and thermogravimetry (TG) in air and nitrogen environments to study their thermal behaviors. From the resulting data, kinetic parameters for different stages of thermal degradation were obtained following the method of Broido. Cone calorimetry and Fourier-Transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy were also conducted to understand mechanistic properties of both materials. Activation energies were found to decrease, and higher residual masses were found in the treated samples, which indicated an improvement in the flame retardancy of the treated wood