Passive Fire Protection
Firestopping and fireproofing products can be ablative in nature. This can mean endothermic materials, or merely materials that are sacrificial and become "spent" over time while exposed to fire such as silicone firestop products. Given sufficient time under fire or heat conditions, these products char away, crumble, and disappear. The idea is to put enough of this material in the way of the fire that a level of fire-resistance rating can be maintained, as demonstrated in a fire test. Ablative materials usually have a large concentration of organic matter that is reduced by fire to ashes. In the case of silicone, organic rubber surrounds very finely divided silica dust (up to 380 m² of combined surface area of all the dust particles per gram of this dust). When the organic rubber is exposed to fire it burns to ash and leaves behind the silica dust with which the product started.
Read more about this topic: Ablation
Famous quotes containing the words passive, fire and/or protection:
“She has taken her passive pigeon poor,
She has buried him down and down.
He never shall sally to Sally
Nor soil any roofs of the town.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Your eyes were frosted starlight,
Your heart fire and snow.
Who was it said, “I love you”?
Alice: Mother, let me go!”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)