Theoretical and experimental analysis of the heat absorbing profile in passive fire protection materials

Substances undergoing endothermic reactions are of wide interest in the development of materials oriented to fire passive protection. These components can be used as aggregates in usual building materials in order to improve the response under high temperature scenarios. The mechanism of action is based on the absorption of part of the generated heat of combustion by the corresponding endothermic reactions. The materials can be formulated in order to spread the position of absorbing peaks along the overall temperature domain. In order to achieve the mentioned goal it is necessary to perform an exhaustive characterization of the different chemical substances. Specifically we analyze the underlying kinetic behavior under different heating rates as an essential ingredient to model heat transfer phenomena in spatially extended systems. On the one hand we perform a series of experiments with different formulations, aggregate sizes and heating rates. On the other hand we carry out numerical simulations in order to compare the results with the experimental data.