After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the use of simple beds made by cardboard also known as cardboard beds has become widespread among evacuation shelters at the time of natural disasters. Because cardboard beds are made solely of cardboard, it has a greater risk of fire. In order to make safer operations of evacuation shelters, flame retardancy is required for cardboard beds.<br/>In this study, for inventing incombustible cardboard, all possible types of flame retarding materials were examined to evaluate which type of material is effective. In addition to that, resin coating was experimentally applied to cardboard so that it could protect users from toxic effect caused by flame retarding materials such as skin irritation. In order to retain recyclability of cardboard, water-soluble Poly-vinyl alcohol (PVA) was chosen for the experiment, but since PVA is also a flammable material, it has to be made incombustible as well. Due to the above-mentioned reasons, we made both cardboard and PVA incombustible. In this study, we mainly focused on PVA, and comparisons were made regarding the flammability between two different types of flame retarding materials. Previously, three types of phosphorous-based flame retarding materials and ammonium sulfate were experimented. As shown in Fig. 1, mixture of PVA with 20% of ammonium sulfate reveals substantially lower combustion value. However, its flame retarding effect is not actually up to expectation, new flame retarding materials need to be found. Based on the assumption that nitrogen included in ammonium sulfate which was found most effective, it may contribute to the flame retardancy characteristic of PVA. And two kinds of new flame retarding materials that include nitrogen were chosen for the experiment. As a result, the flameretrardant which include Halogen, Phosphorus, Nitrogen gave great flameretardancy to PVA<br/><br/>

Flameretardancy study of PVA use for cardboard beds

251st National Meeting (2016)

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