Improving the flame retardancy of polymeric materials
used in engineering
applications is an increasingly important strategy for limiting fire
hazards. However, the wide variety of flame retardant polymeric nanocomposite
compositions prevents quick identification of the optimal design for
a specific application. In this study, we built a flame retardancy
database of more than 800 polymeric nanocomposites, including information
from polymer flammability, thermal stability, and nanofiller properties.
Then, we applied five machine learning algorithms to predict the flame
retardancy index for different types of flame retardant polymeric
nanocomposites. Among them, extreme gradient boosting regression gives
the best prediction with a coefficient of determination (R
2) of 0.94 and a root-mean-square error of 0.17. In addition,
we studied how the physical features of polymeric nanocomposites affected
flame retardancy using the correlation matrix and feature importance
plot, which in turn was used to guide the design of polymeric nanocomposites
for flame retardant applications. Following the guidelines, a high-performance
flame retardant polymeric nanocomposite was designed and synthesized,
and the experimental FRI result was compared with the machine learning
prediction (6% prediction error). This result demonstrated a fast
identification of flame retardancy of polymeric nanocomposite without
large-scale fire tests, which could accelerate the design of functional
polymeric nanocomposites in the flame retardant field.