Poster abstracts-Fire Resistance of Sandwich Composite Materials

Abstract

Compared to traditional steel, polymer-based composite materials offer many advantages (weight, resistance, aging, etc.) for structural applications in shipbuilding, railway transportation network, aeronautics or building. Despite their quality and unlike other materials such as steel and aluminium, composite materials commonly used in structural applications are reactive. They decompose and release heat and smoke when they are exposed to high fire temperature. The reactivity of composite materials affects their mechanical behaviours. For this reason, the fire resistance is one of the most significant factors limiting the use of composites when it comes to structural applications.In this context, a French collaborative research project, FLACOMARE “Fire resistance of composite materials” supported by the Regional Council of Ile-France, studies the fire behaviour (e.g. the fire reaction and the fire resistance) of composite materials used in transportation. The aim of the Flacomare project consists in developing a methodology to assess the thermo-mechanical behaviour of composite structures in case of fire. Modelling the fire resistance of a composite structure implies capabilities in modelling fire testing (reaction and resistance), thermal behaviour, and structural behaviour at elevated/high temperature. To achieve this, a method based on a combined test-simulation approach, with increasing scale and complexity, was used. The experimental analysis of the product fire behaviour (reaction and resistance) was carried out from matter scale, up to large scale, through five successive scale levels. The experimental characterisation of thermal transport, thermo-mechanical and chemical properties as well as the fire test were performed using standard test benches and metrological reference benches. Meanwhile, advanced numerical simulation tools were used to simulate the reaction to fire with a coupled pyrolysis/computational fluid dynamics model and the fire resistance by a thermo-structural code. The methodology is performed to guarantee that the behaviour of material samples, that is similar to that of the finite product, is well reproduced. Therefore, the great challenge is to investigate/find a way to simulate the fire behaviour of large-scale fire tests.The poster focuses on the fire safety engineering methodology, applied in FLACOMARE to predict the fire behaviour of a composite structure. The first part describes the coupling/association between the coupled pyrolysis/computational fluid dynamics model and the structural code. Then in a second part, the first results obtained experimentally and numerically are described and illustrated. The analysis is performed on a sandwich composite material.