Numerical modeling of the heat transfer mechanism in intumescent heat- and fire-protection materials

The Modeling of Heat Transfer across Intumescent Polymer Coatings

“…(iv) From the earliest papers on modeling of intumescent coatings by Cagliostro et al [10], researchers [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] have shown that the amount the coating expands has a major impact on the thermal resistance of the material. However, in modeling the expansion process virtually all researchers resort to using an 'expansion factor' method; an experimentally measured, post-intumescence, coating thickness is used to calculate a factor used to predict the developing thickness of the coating as a function of the coating temperature [3,4,11] or conversion of gas-producing component (or fractional mass loss) in the coating [10,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] (The model of Asaro et al [24] went to the extreme of basing the heat transfer calculations on only the post-intumesence thickness, without taking account of the affect of variation in thickness during heating, with consequent poor agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data.) It has been noted [25] that the use of an expansion factor can produce predictions that do not agree with experimental observations.…”

“…Figure16. Predicted and experimental data for substrate temperature for coating B in a low oxygen environment.…”