Professor Guan Yeoh from the University of New South Wales talks about a new fire-retardant paint that can stop your house from burning in fire emergencies.
Originally published by 360info.
Originally published by 360info.
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LearningTranscript
00:00 What we have developed here is actually quite a breakthrough
00:04 because it's a paint that has satisfied the second highest fire rating
00:09 which means that it can protect houses.
00:13 If you apply the paint, which is an undercoat, onto the house
00:17 it will transform itself to a very thick carbon or char layer
00:21 that actually protects the substrate and deflecting the heat away from the bushfires.
00:27 It's basically just like the normal undercoat that you would use for a lot of paints at the moment
00:32 but it just has some so-called secret ingredients that actually grows the layer.
00:37 That's basically what it is.
00:39 I can't reveal my secret ingredients to you.
00:41 I have to do like Colonel Sanders protecting the KFC recipe.
00:46 So basically this is the holder of the sample itself.
00:50 I'm going to put it in.
00:51 So this is the untreated wood.
00:53 That is the treated wood.
00:54 So you can see the difference because of the undercoat being applied onto the surface of the timber.
00:59 So what's happening here is that the surface of the sample is subjected to
01:03 I would say a temperature now roughly 800 degrees C.
01:06 The surface of the wood is so-called turning black or it's called charring as well.
01:13 And eventually it will come to a point where it reaches a certain threshold
01:17 or a certain temperature that it will ignite spontaneously.
01:22 When you talk about fire, it reaches around 1000 to 1200 degrees C.
01:26 That is how hot the fire is.
01:28 And basically when it reaches the surface, it's around that temperature.
01:32 And what you try to do then is to have a protective layer
01:36 that can decrease the temperature from 1000 degrees C to roughly around 25 to 30 degrees C at the substrate surface.
01:45 So basically we're going to carry out the same experiments again.
01:47 That means that by putting the treated sample into the coat.
01:51 Okay, so I'm putting the treated sample into the furnace or the oven.
01:56 And I'm going to start the test by opening the shutter.
02:00 The same process will occur on the timber as well.
02:03 But now what happened here is that the heat is affecting the paint layer.
02:07 Not on the timber substrate, it's the paint layer.
02:10 You can see that now the layer of the paint is transforming into a carbon layer or the char layer.
02:18 It is activated around 200 degrees C.
02:21 So what happened here is that we are trying to ignite the layer with the flame itself.
02:26 But it's not igniting.
02:28 Eventually what happened here is that it's just activating the carbon.
02:32 It's trying to grow the carbon to a certain layer to protect the timber substrate.
02:37 And eventually what you will see is that basically the flame will be extinguished altogether.
02:42 Not like what you've seen with the untreated one where the flames keep burning or whatever.
02:47 So what this equipment tries to do is try to ignite the layer itself but it's not igniting.
02:53 It's just flashes of flame but you can see that now it's gone.
02:57 The carbon layer now has grown to, you know, you're talking about 0.5 mm.
03:01 Well, right up to almost 20 mm.
03:03 It's grown from a very thin layer to a very thick layer.
03:07 You can see some residue of the paint there.
03:09 But you can see the wooden surface is actually not burnt at all.
03:12 Prep your surface again and then you repaint it.
03:16 It's as straightforward as that.
03:18 We all recognise that the climate is changing.
03:21 The climate is actually moving very quickly to be very extreme.
03:26 So we just need to get prepared that especially for dry weather,
03:30 we need something to increase the resilience and hope that this will be the start of the development of what people think of using common things like paint or even other devices or whatever to actually increase the fire resilience.
03:45 It comes in 4 litres and 10 litres.
03:48 And it comes in two colours, white and grey.
03:52 (laughing)